[lug] Installing Linux on PowerPC G3

[Nate Duehr]

On Jul 13, 2004, at 3:59 PM, Timothy Klein wrote:
>
> Tangent:
>
> As I understand it, this is one of the prominent reasons getting the 
> next
> release of Debian ready for stable can be a pain in the ass.  Debian 
> has a
> policy of treating all architectures with the same validity.  Thus an
> Intelism in a prominent piece of software needs to either be fixed, or 
> that
> software ditched, before the next release.  And Debiann suports a 
> bunch of
> acrhitectures.
>
> It sounds like a major headache.  I don't evny Debian developers.
>
> Tim

It's actually a very insightful tangent.  If you understand this, you 
understand why the installer for Debian always seems to "suck" compared 
to other distros that only support i386.  Autodetection of hardware, 
and i386-isms like hunting through all the IRQ's for "Plug and Play" 
devices, etc... just don't work correctly on the multiple architectures 
that Debian supports... so stuff like that ends up taking a back-seat 
to just getting the installer working on all the archs... and the 
debian-installer project is constantly plagued with not having enough 
people/resources to do the "fun" stuff the i386-only guys now do as a 
standard installation.

Then if you extrapolate this further, this is why it's really easy to 
take a Debian spin-off like Knoppix that's tweaked for only i386 and 
has great hardware detection -- steal the configs from it and stuff the 
information it gathers about your hardware (like the X configuration) 
back into a stock Debian install on i386 and make it work correctly.  
;-)

And then of course after you do that a few times you know your hardware 
well enough (and what Debian needs configured by hand to support your 
hardware) that you just do it and don't realize you're even doing it...

Some architectures are so standardized that some work has been done in 
the installer to handle them better - Sparc and PPC being two good 
examples, because there's only a limited subset of ways things can be 
setup because the hardware is always standard.  Unfortunately with PPC, 
Apple's not as open about things always as Sun is... so it takes a 
little reverse engineering time for someone to figure out what 
information about the hardware is actually present and how to get at 
it.  Early sound driver attempts on PPC were pretty horrible, but 
eventually caught up and surpassed the i386 platforms for ease of 
setup.  (Nowadays there's pretty much a single kernel module that 
handles apple sound for almost all newer PPC machines.)

Fun stuff, those tangents.  (!)

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com