Fedora Dropping Official PowerPC Support

by Joe Brockmeier - May. 10, 2010Comments (8)

Fedora Logo Fedora 13 will bring a lot of interesting new features when it's released in late May, but also interesting is what's going to be missing. For example, official support for PowerPC. So what happens now, and what's the right thing to do for users on niche platforms?

PowerPC has never been a major platform for Linux, but it had a loyal following when Apple was still selling PowerPC-based systems. Fedora was one of the last hold-outs for PowerPC, along with Debian. openSUSE continued support for PowerPC up until the 11.2 release that came out last fall. Sony's decision to remove Linux support from the PS3 probably had some effect on this, now that no mainstream companies are selling client systems based on PowerPC.

Though some PPC users get up in arms about the change, it's simply not worth it for a community distribution to officially support platforms that only have a tiny fraction of the user base. And the community response often bears out the decision. Though the openSUSE community was welcome to pick up and maintain the distribution, to this date it hasn't happened. There simply aren't enough users to carry the load.

Fedora will also allow the community to pick up PowerPC support if enough users care to do so. It's been moved to their secondary architectures for Fedora. What does that mean? In short, the build systems for Fedora will create packages for each platform, but if builds fail for the primary architectures, it's considered fatal. They can't be put in the repository if they don't work. If there are any other bugs that affect the platform, it holds up release.

For secondary architectures, build failures and bugs won't stop a release. They are released independently of the main project.

Fedora's SIG (special interest group) way of handling niche architectures is a good one. It allows parts of the community to focus on areas that don't make sense for the larger project. And supporting PowerPC at this point doesn't make sense for any Linux distribution, really. It hits less than 1% of the user base. Most projects have more work than hands as-is. In most cases, time spent supporting an architecture or package that doesn't reach even 1% of the user base is wasted time.

It's not the end of the road for PowerPC on Linux in total, though. There's still Yellow Dog Linux, and Debian, but the options for PowerPC are thinning.

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by Zauber on May. 11, 2010

Say, isn't PowerPC support the very reason that Linus Torvalds himself is using Fedora?

0 Votes

by Rahul Sundaram on May. 11, 2010

"Say, isn't PowerPC support the very reason that Linus Torvalds himself is using Fedora?"

That was the original reason but Linus has moved off PPC a while back although he continues to use Fedora

0 Votes

by Rahul Sundaram on May. 11, 2010

William,

You are looking for http://rpmfusion.org

0 Votes

by El Spamolito on May. 11, 2010

hi dear

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on May. 13, 2010

there is CRUX PPC too.

0 Votes

by El Spamolito on Jun. 12, 2010

I just got a new fedora a month ago, but after keeping it in storage, pulled it out today to find that it seemed to be a tad too big.

http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/pure-cleanse-pro-review-wher...

0 Votes

by habika on Jun. 15, 2010

This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are unanimous and needs to be appreciated by everyone.I appreciate the concern which is been rose. The things need to be sorted out because it is about the individual but it can be with

everyone.

==============================

Support for Technology

0 Votes

by aram on Oct. 16, 2010

Thank God, Fedora dropped support for PPC. I have tried installing both 11 and 12 versions on G4 Titanium. It gave me hell of a frustration. Even after using a DVD version of about 4GB, its installation insisted on downloading everything from the net. (Heck! what use is burning 4GB ?) It took me more time than what Gentoo did with sources downloading and compiling! Atleast the latter gave better satisfaction and if we prepare as per instructions, Gentoo is a smoother distro. Perhaps Archlinux i may try for ppc. Any ideas?

0 Votes