Subject: [OT] Encouragement for PowerPC platform
From: Michael A. Peters (Moonglue@141.com )
Date: Tue Aug 22 2000 - 22:50:56 MDT
Not so much here, but many places (such as ars-technica and some
other lists I'm on) I've heard a lot of talk about how linux on
PowerPC just insn't quite as smooth as x86, not as well supported,
etc. and that x86 is easier to install and better for new people.
Well, here's to the contrary:
Two installs today on older x86 hardware that *should* work fine-
I installed Caldera's eServer (or whatever they call it) on my 400 MHz AMK-K6.
Not a new chip, yada.
I have Red Hat 6.2 on drive hda which I need to keep, so I installed
Caldera on hdb but I decided to use the same /boot partition. Sure,
Caldera would install its own kernel and its own lilo, but no biggy-
I just hand edit lilo and rerun lilo after first boot. Done it
numerous times while installing various Red Hat distros on hdb.
If I could get a first boot- lilo wouldn't load. Caldera didn't have
/boot as a "listed" mount point in the install, I did it custom. When
Caldera updated lilo, it just assumed /boot was on the same partition
as / and wrote lilo that way! Bad, bad, very bad. A seperate /boot is
common.
Since I didn't have a boot floppy and couldn't figure out how to
mount the root file system (either Red Hats or Calderas) on either
the Red Hat or Caldera CD as the /partition (needed to fix lilo-
well, my boot had to be at /boot anyway), I ended up having to boot
off a Slackware CD to fix it!
After I fixed up lilo so I could dual boot (and boot period) I booted
in Caldera, no video signal was being given to the monitor once it
booted and went to gui login. Opening up a console wasn't working
either- monitor was getting no signal.
Command-alt-delete worked to clean reboot, I booted in Red Hat,
mounted Caldera, changed the default runlevel, and rebooted Caldera.
Ran XF86Setup and it was fine.
Alex, the guy next to me, installed TurboLinux on his machine (same
as mine- 400MHz AMD). X worked but his pointer didn't show, and he
had only a partial screen. He was able to manually edit XF86Setup to
get it to work.
Furthermore, neither backspace or delete worked at all! Control-H
did, but not backspace or delete.
Two examples of current modern Distros with awful install problems on
x86 hardware that is by no means "new". I'd say the PowerPC distros
are in no way "a little behind" x86.
With PPC, we definately got a good thing going.
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Michael A. Peters-- http://24.5.29.77/Linux_Pages/
http://www.omnilinux.com/
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