Month: November 2006

So, I’ve been asked three times in as many days if Ubutunu’s discussion about potentially dropping PowerPC as a supported platform is an indicator of Gentoo/PowerPC’s future.

Simple answer? No. 🙂

Gentoo/PowerPC is here to stay. Ubunutu is free to allocate their resources as they see fit, but I don’t see the point in dropping a platform that is still actively developed. Consider that if the Playstation3 sells even a tenth of the PS2 units sold, there will be an additional 10 million PowerPC systems that can run PowerPC linux out of the box. Genesi’s Efika is now shipping and there are plenty of affordable PowerPC Macs still available in the Used market. All 3 of the new gaming consoles have PowerPC processors, really, things don’t look so bad. Cut and run? Not us! Sure, our target audience may change somewhat to better support non-apple machines, but still, the Gentoo/PowerPC port is just as viable as it ever has been. 🙂

Aside from keeping the doomsday folks quiet, I’ve been busy working on an embedded board (Xilinx ML403) for a university project. It was really simple to configure a uclibc root and get Linux booting, all using Gentoo of course. 🙂 When I finish with the project I’ll try to document the process in case anyone else is planning on using one of these boards. In any case, big thanks to the Gentoo Embedded team for their great work on making this so easy and for giving me another reason why Gentoo is still the distro that best meets my needs.

I’ve been maintaining Mac On Linux for a while now, but I’ve finally broken down and admitted that it doesn’t look like the original author is coming back. It’s a shame really, MOL is an awesome piece of software for PowerPC processors. It lets you virtualize MacOS or MacOSX from within Linux. There’s some initial support for running Linux inside MOL as well. So, since I really didn’t want to see this project die, I’ve started a Mac-On-Linux SourceForge Project. The new feature that I’m currently working on is compressed disk support (qcow and dmg) for system images. I’ve checked in preliminary support for that so feel free to check out the CVS version and test it out! 🙂

In bcm43xx news, johill has been very busy working on the firmware. We now know a whole lot more about the PHY registers, so much so that most of spec needs to be rewritten :p That said, we understand how things work now, so in the future better drivers should be on the way. mb has been busy getting bcm43xx working properly on WRT as well which should increase the number of devs and testers available. Always a good thing!

Chris White: Glad to see you like PPC assembly! As I’m sure you’ve found out by now, it’s way easier to work with than x86 asm. 🙂