Thursday, March 21, 2013

ArchLinux PowerPC?

Peter S. emailed me a Youtube link that I found somewhat interesting.



Linux.Extra - ArchLinuxPPC and XFCE switch Ep/1

Basically this person's suggesting he's going to start an ArchLinux port for PowerPC, sort of take over the project from where it was abandoned a couple of years ago. I don't know if this will come to fruition as it's a ton of work, but the author has been posting videos regularly so we'll see.

In the meantime, if you want a rolling release, which is what ArchLinux is (a release where the latest packages are updated as they come in), you can run Debian Sid and also pick packages from the experimental branch. You may be able to do something similar on Ubuntu, but I'm not sure. The thing about a rolling release, though, is that things can break. There isn't a lot of testing done before packages are allowed into the repository, and this is why rolling releases are geared to the more adventurous. But I've never used Arch, so it would be interesting to see the stability of their bleeding-edgeness vs. that of a traditional release-based distribution.

In other news, there's been some chatter on Linux blogs lately about Ubuntu's future plans (Mir, release schedules) and how they might affect the Xubuntu and Lubuntus of the world. There's thus far baseless speculation that the other flavors might jump ship and base themselves on Debian or some other distribution, but on the Lubuntu mailing list Lubuntu's lead developer withheld their opinion but said they'd have more to say when work is done on the current development release. So stay tuned.

I wonder how long Canonical can keep up its secrecy and arbitrary decision-making before people decide it's not a community worth contributing to anymore.

2 comments:

  1. If that person makes a distro like Cinnarch (a kinda of "gui" installer and a "gui" for pacman) for powerpcs I am totally in.
    Arch linux is a very nice distro, but that purist thing of doing ALL things in terminal is too much for me.
    I like using terminal, I respect the ones who do, but installing arch linux took me about 1hour, with no sucess (I was following the wiki).
    Cinnarch took about 15minutes and with absolute sucess, and lots of speed.
    nice to see people interested in deving for powerpc!

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