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 Linux on PowerPC FAQ-O-Matic : Wish List :
Wish it ran on POWER boxes. |
Is anyone working on a port to older POWER machines (i.e. older RS/6000
machines)? It would sure be nice to see one of these running at a decent speed
(Nothing against AIX, it's just big and hungry).
I heard that IBM aren't going to release any documentation for these machines. I
could have been imagining it, though.
I'd be interested in helping with this, if anyone's doing it.
rbt@mtlb.co.uk |
Who are you, you email is stale.
andy@promethium.ucl.ac.uk |
I'd like to echo the 'stale' request above! I recently picked up a pair of RS/6000 7011 model 250s, two XStation 140s, and a NCD ExploraPro (403GA). The local college gave them to interested students. AIX isn't too bad, but all I have is the os. There are no apps, no install media, nothing, just what came on the hard disk. They're ancient machines and there are no other operating systems that I'm aware of that will run on them, and I would really like to put them to use.
obsidian@dmi.net |
Me too. As far as apps for AIX, Groupe Bull maintains a very good collection of shareware/freeware and you can order it on CD. The good part is that it is packaged as an LPP (which I think is like a Linux RPM) so you can install via SMIT, have version control, apply but not commit software, back it out, etc.
IBM has announced that the POWER-4 has booted Linux, and they are pretty hyper about Linux, so I would think that a POWER-based port might be forthcoming. (I'm pretty sure Linux runs on POWER-3 since it runs the PPC instruction set and got rid of the last old POWER instructions). However, the boxes you have are ancient (25MHz POWER-1). The 250 might be PPC 601 based, in which case it wouldn't be very much effort to port. Since PPC used most of the POWER instruction set, a port mainly just involves changes to cache/virtual memory assembly routines and a recompile. Famous last words... ;)
abyrd@austin.rr.com |
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Wish we had SMP support