Choosing a distro, PPC style ...

[Zoltan/ZEE4]

I'm not sure if this is what your looking for but...

There aren't a lot of PPC motherboards around that don't come with an
Apple case, but you might want to look into is the Texon, which is sold
here under the AmigaOne name. Basically it's a ATX board with the option
of a mounted G3 or a socketed G3 or G4 and come with all the regular
features (USB1, networking, AGP, PCI, etc.). They sell for about $900
(Can.) for the base model last time I checked. There's a cheeper one due
out early next year with a mini-ATX form size. It will likely have a ATI
card built-in along with USB2 and Firewire built-in.

These boards have been tested with Debian and SuSE amoung others.
personally I've mostly used RedHat, so I'm waiting for YellowDog to be
ported myself, but might well go for SuSE.

see: 
http://amigaone-linux.sourceforge.net/

or do a search for "AmigaOne Linux" on google, there's been a lot
written about these boards. 

Zoltan
www.zee4.com



On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 23:17, Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill wrote:
> FWIW, this comments reflect  my *opinions*.  I'm hoping to find somebody
> with sufficiently similar opinions to suggest a distribution which I may
> like.
> 
> I have been using Debian on a PPC for three years now, and while it has
> its good points, I would like to switch away from it.
> 
> The first qualification is obvious: it must be available for the PPC.
> This is a consumer grade machine (ie. Apple), not a fancy server (eg.
> IBM), nor an embedded thingy.
> 
> A default install must be reasonably light weight.  I abhor desktop
> managers, have been known to use X11 without a window manager, and have
> a nasty tendancy to use the console.
> 
> (No Yellow Dog, SuSE?)
> 
> A default install should contain basic programming tools: C is not my
> friend, but I am stuck using it; gdb is my friend, because I'm stuck
> using C.  I don't need anything more sophisticated than that.  Text
> processors (notably TeX) must also be available as a package.
> 
> The package management system myst be sane!  I'm tired of hunting down
> separate program, documentation, and development packages.  Maintainers
> should also keep dependencies to a minimum.  I have never understood the
> collection of tools shipped with Debian, and it was difficult to find
> stuff in the one tool which I am familiar with (dpkg, dselect).  FWIW, I
> have found NetBSD's ports collection to be sane, particularly since it
> was easy to download binary packages.
> 
> (No Debian, Gentoo?)
> 
> I'm not partial to *BSD or Linux, but I have had trouble with NetBSD in
> the past -- with respect to supported hardware.  (eg. upgrade a kernel,
> and the hard drive isn't detected; video is OpenFirmware only, and
> horrendously slow.)
> 
> (No NetBSD?)
> 
> Any suggestions, or is this a hopeless cause?
> 
> Thank-you,
> Byron.
> --
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