Matt's post in regard Ubuntu 7.04 :

Summary:

Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04, the PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be
reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting
infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community
team.

Full decision:

The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to reclassify PowerPC as an
unofficial architecture, rather than a fully supported architecture, for
Ubuntu 7.04 and subsequent releases. This means that packages and ISO
images will continue to be produced, but releases will not be delayed due
to problems which are specific to PowerPC, and the quality of the PowerPC
release itself will depend very much on the extent to which members of the
Ubuntu community drive PowerPC testing and bug fixes.

The rationale for this decision has been recorded in the PowerPC Review
document at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCReview, which was derived from
a discussion at our developer summit in November. The conversation has
continued, and for some time we have pursued a number of sources for
funding to continue the official testing and support for the architecture.
Unfortunately those resources have not been obtained, and we can not make
the necessary commitments to continue official support for this
architecture.

A team of PowerPC users and developers has been formed at
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-powerpc and will be the focus of efforts to
keep Ubuntu's PowerPC support at high quality. We welcome wider
participation in that team, and if developers devote some additional time
to the work then there is no reason that Ubuntu on PowerPC should not
continue to deliver high quality releases.

It is possible that PowerPC will once again become a fully supported
architecture in the future, if the resources needed to guarantee its
quality are found. The architecture is certainly gaining large numbers of
users in embedded and console devices, and there are many reasons to
continue to work with the platform. These uses are outside of the core
Ubuntu mandate, however, so resources cannot be diverted from our server
and desktop efforts just to address their needs.

Existing Ubuntu PowerPC releases will continue to be maintained for the
duration of their supported life cycles, including Ubuntu 6.06 LTS which
will be supported on PowerPC servers until 2011.

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@opi

I'm afraid more of this sort of announcement is likely to continue over time with regards to any sort of desktop based uses (i.e. non-specialized or enterprise server uses) for the PowerPC architecture. Ubuntu is aimed at desktops so it's not too surprising to me that it has come to that.

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@opi

Less competition for OS4

Last edited by Fransexy on 13-Feb-2007 at 09:44 PM.

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Make Amiga Great Again

Quote:

Less competence for OS4

Absolutely.
-Tig

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@opi

Well PPC is, and will be in the future too, officially supported platform in Debian. So it should not be any big problem if Ubuntu drops PPC support..

Last edited by miksuh on 13-Feb-2007 at 09:51 PM.
Last edited by miksuh on 13-Feb-2007 at 09:50 PM.

@miksuh

However, the support for PPC will decline over time no matter what distro. So will the number of packages. It is just a matter of time before PPC as a desktop platform "dies" and this is pretty natural since there are no desktop PPC computers for sale. (well, maybe very minor niche computers like the Genesi ones, but that is hardly big enough numbers to keep the Linux PPC community going).

Last edited by ealm on 13-Feb-2007 at 10:18 PM.

Only a small blow to PPC desktops it seems. There will still be distros, just not directly supported by the official ubuntu team. Any one want to place a bet on which is larger, numbers of ubuntu PPC desktops or Amiga's on PPC

I've been looking forward to this ubuntu distro... http://www.ubuntustudio.com/ ... but I plan to run it on a multi-core amd system.


Plaz

:(

Time for Debian PPC :)

I really don't understand you guys.

There is and will be more PPC linuz computers than ever.

Even here has been tens of treads about linuz on playstation/ nintendo etc.

@utri007

But we are interested only in MorphOS or AmigaOS hardware :)

@utri007

Quote:

There is and will be more PPC linuz computers than ever.

What makes you think that? There are no major (not even minor) producers or resellers of PPC-based desktop computers, or any kind of PPC-based personal computers.

99% of all the Linux PPC users are Mac users, and since no new macs come with PPC anymore the PPC users gets less everytime a mac user upgrades to a newer mac. Thus, the PPC Desktop Linux user base is dying...

@ealm

Quote:

However, the support for PPC will decline over time no matter what distro.

This might be true with most of the distros. But Debian still supports eg.SPARC, Alpha and even m68k, so i don't think PPC will be dropped anytime soon

Last edited by miksuh on 13-Feb-2007 at 11:55 PM.
Last edited by miksuh on 13-Feb-2007 at 11:55 PM.

@miksuh

I was talking about desktop use. The packages avail for anything but a typical server, are very few for platforms like those you mention.

@miksuh

Quote:

This might be true with most of the distros. But Debian still supports eg.SPARC, Alpha and even m68k, so i don't think PPC will be dropped anytime soon

Yup, I good distro is better than several that are "just hanging on there". Debian might be not "popular" and that ain't a bad thing.

Jack

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I too wish that there was a future for desktop PPC Linux, but really guys there isn't. It is a logical consequence that the quality of PPC Linux will decline as the user base does so.

Update: Oh, and btw - SPARC is still actively developed and deployed for workstation/desktop use. Something PPC is not.

Last edited by ealm on 14-Feb-2007 at 12:32 AM.
Last edited by ealm on 14-Feb-2007 at 12:27 AM.
Last edited by ealm on 14-Feb-2007 at 12:27 AM.

@utri007

Quote:

There is and will be more PPC linuz computers than ever

The PS3 barely has enough RAM to run a modern Linux distribution (and yes, that's a decent criticism of modern Linux distributions), and doesn't even have properly accelerated 2D graphics under Linux. Nobody is seriously running desktop Linux distributions on any Nintendo hardware. We (I'm one of the Ubuntu technical board) have seen a significant drop in the number of people downloading the PPC version of Ubuntu, and there's no significant hardware on the market that's going to reverse that.

In reality, the next few versions of Ubuntu will probably still be of about the same quality on PPC as they are now. Several of the developers still use PPCs as their primary system, and they're not going to let them just stop working. And if there's still no PPC hardware shipping in volume in 18 months time, then, well.

PPC is dead, long live AMD64.

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@elatour

Quote:

I'm afraid more of this sort of announcement is likely to continue over time with regards to any sort of desktop based uses (i.e. non-specialized or enterprise server uses) for the PowerPC architecture. Ubuntu is aimed at desktops so it's not too surprising to me that it has come to that.

There are server flavors of Ubuntu as well. But I think maybe you mean that Ubuntu is more for "regular humans" rather than for "tech geeks"? And tech geeks usually have no problems with configuring gentoo anyway, which mean they will end up with an OS that is more customised at low level for what they want it to do; server, desktop, whatever. And PPC is more of a "tech geek" platform, so...

But Ubuntu is a nice OS IMHO, and I'm glad that development and releases will continue for the PPC. GGS Data installed a flavor called Xubuntu on my Efika...

IF POWER7 arrives for UEFI enabled HTT Socket AM2+ (Sempr0n/Athlon 64/Opteron 1xxx), HTT Socket F+ (Athlon 64 FX,/Opteron 2xxx/8xxx) motherboards and HTX CPU add-on cards....

www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/22/ibm_power7_opteron/
www.theregister.com/2006/09/21/amd_open_opteron/
www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~112780,00.html

Last edited by Hammer on 14-Feb-2007 at 08:10 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 14-Feb-2007 at 08:06 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 14-Feb-2007 at 08:00 AM.

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@ealm

Quote:

It is just a matter of time before PPC as a desktop platform "dies" and this is pretty natural since there are no desktop PPC computers for sale.

Linux isn't really a desktop OS anyway, although it could certainly be used as such in some cases (if you are a 'techie', a bit stubborn, and does not need your "desktop computer" for any of those applications used on a daily basis by professionals in any serious profession, etc). This is even more true for AmigaOS and MorphOS BTW. And this no matter the CPU architecture.

PPC is only "small" and "declining" if you look at it through the same old *x86 desktop glasses* everyone seems to use here.