[WBEL-devel] WBEL on PPC32?

[John Morris]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Charles Stevenson wrote:

> > Has anyone here given any thought to trying to get the AS version of 
> > WBEL running on the IBM pSeries workstations?  I might be willing to 
> > undertake this, if not.
> 
> Not to my knowledge. A good base would be Yellow Dog Linux since it's
> pretty much rpmbuild --rebuild of RH 9 on PowerPC.  RedHat has no desire
> to create a ppc distro due to their Intel contract ;-) If you need any
> help let me know I've got a year of developing YDL under my belt and an
> iBook at home running Debian.

Interesting.  Must admit I don't follow the world of the rainbow fruit
like I probably should (Yea, yea, Apple is dying.  But they have been
managing to do it at a profit for about twenty years now.) but it sounds
like fun.  Just because RH doesn't see a profit/insert fav conspiracy
theory/etc doesn't mean there shouldn't be a port to Apple PPC hardware. I
know I'd laugh my darned fool head off if a couple of those big high
profile clusters of XServes ended up on a RHEL rebuild because RH didn't
bother with an official port.  Ok, I'm easily amused.

So can anyone who knows the PPC universe fill in some details to satisfy
my curiosity?  Does the PPC world handle 32/64 bit like x86_64 & Sparc
with a biarch install or does it have to be one or the other?  Is the
PPC64 question worth asking in the Mac context? What are the practical
minimum requirements for a buildhost?  Just how useful would a port really
be?  After all, Yellow Dog isn't exactly a top tier distro and they have
had the PPC on Mac space mostly to themselves for a few years unless you
count Debian and *BSD.  Can enough of the Mac Faithful be convinced to
load a non-Apple OS? (And lets us be blunt here.  Debian is for the
faithful, not newbies and certainly not the average Machead.)

Other than i386 and x86_64, PPC is the only halfway interesting target
left.  Sparc isn't all that interesting because affordable buildhosts
aren't available. (I don't know about anyone else, but I'd never consider
using my Sparc20 as a buildhost.)  Alpha is for all intents and purposes a
dead platform.  Don't have any big IBM iron and am not really interested
in going there anyway.  Let RH have their support contract from anyone
leasing one of those monsters.  Itanic isn't dead yet but will be soon
enough that don't see a point of scrounging eBay for one of those white 
elephants.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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