[PlanetCCRMA] Future of PowerPC for Planet CCRMA?

[William M. Quarles]

Hello Planet list,

For those of you who haven't read, I'm trying to help Fernando get a 
PowerPC distribution of Planet CCRMA going for Fedora. I took this on as 
an experiment, and boy is it an experiment.

Well, there's news... I don't know if it's good or not yet. Fedora 12 
turned my new-old Power Mac G4 AGP into an electronic brick. After much 
frustration, I gave up on F12 and tried F11 instead. F12 could not work 
in graphical installation mode on my machine (neither with kernel nor 
VESA modes), and also during and after text installation it could not 
get an ip address, through no fault of my home network at all.

On Fedora 11 I had the same problem with graphical installation, but I 
was able to get a text-based network installation to work, then download 
most of the needed packages for graphical workstation with applications 
through yum at the text command prompt. This was much better.

I'm guessing that X did not work at all for many early Mac G4 graphics 
cards on Fedora 11 nor Fedora 12 until recent updates came about, since 
at my check Fedora 12 has only been around 3-4 months, and both releases 
initially had the exact same problems with X with the installer on my 
ATI Radeon 7200 card. I don't know how anyone updated Fedora 12 after a 
disc install without being able to get an ip address, neither during 
installation nor post-installation. Perhaps something differently 
happened if they were able to get a graphical installation to work from 
the beginning on F12, I'm not sure.

Anyway, after yumming up Fedora 11 for the ppc on my machine I was able 
to get X to start, but the display of fonts appears to be corrupted. My 
conclusion is that either
1. There hasn't been much (if any) testing done on Power Mac G4 AGP 
models, or
2. There isn't much testing done of Fedora on the ppc platform period 
due to the currently low demand for it on non-Intel Macs and Play 
Station 3s.

Perhaps things will work differently on the newer Mac Minis that 
Fernando mentioned that he would try to get going sometime at Stanford. 
But until I can get a more functional install of X at home here, I won't 
be able to test any of the potential ppc builds myself. I still have 
Fedora 12 installed on two i686 machines in my home, so I would be able 
to easily access any build machines at CCRMA, provided that such access 
is granted.

Any help that list members can grant is appreciated. I've written some 
to the Fedora users list as well, but I use GMANE to access it, and I 
don't think that GMANE is getting all of the new messages from the 
migration yet due to the insanely smaller traffic on there in recent days.

Thanks all,
William