I agree with this. It's sad to see how well organized and 'workable' is
the
i586 side of the Mandrake cooker tree.
I tried to maintain a mirror for us on the East side of the US at:
ftp://ftp.latinomixed.com/Mandrake-devel
and I constantly see how the i586 files get updated but the PPC ones ...
well, they get updated but a lot slower.
This is the day that I cannot still install (using the ISO's or not) the
Mandrake PPC 8.2b on Old World Power PCs (even beige G3's) and on the
iBook
(the only install that I didn't have to use kernels from other distros
to
get Mandrake up and running -- usually I just install Mandrake on Old
World
boxes using Yellow Dog's kernels) I still get spontaneous Kernel panics
every now and then... whether I have USB or not active (in fact, the
OHCI
driver is not even in the /lib/modules/.../drivers... directory, and if
I
try to modprobe the uhci one, it just says that it has a bad IRQ and
dies...
so I just don't use USB anyway).
It's sad to see trivial problems as the ones mentioned below go
un-noticed;
I feel like Mandrake doesn't care about having a strong PPC distro.
From my part, I have Mandrake running on a PIII 800 and I'm very happy
with
it, but if I would've known it was such a bad distro on the PPC side, I
would've just stood with the now poorly maintained LinuxPPC or Suse, or
Yellow Dog .... etc...
I'm willing to help as much as I can to get the PPC tree of Mandrake as
bug-free as it could be. I guess that there are a million other users
like
me out there willing to use Mandrake on their PPC hardware, especially
on
those beige Macs/PowerMax/etc.../*ppc .
Overall, to wrap up, I consider the distro to be pretty good as of now,
especially since a version was skipped to keep up with the i586 distro (
from 8.0 to 8.2 ). Let's keep up the good work!
From: Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The Future of the Mandrake PPC Distribution.
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 11:10:02 -0800
Today I received my emailed copy of the Mandrake Community Newsletter
(if you didn't get a copy you can find it online here:
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=2010〈=en ).
In it was a quote from Stew talking about how 8.2/ppc was coming along.
But really (no offense to Stew) considering the way things are truly
going it seems rather pr'ish. And frankly I have to wonder considering
Mandrake's announced money problems if PPC isn't one of the projects
that they are or have made a hard decision about.
Many of you aren't aware of this probably but Stew has been "fighting
the system" just to get us a PPC distribution. By that I mean the
following:
a) Stew is not able to delete anything from the mirrors. For example
there are netscape locale packages still up there. But Stew doesn't
have enough access to the cluster machine in order to remove the files.
b) When Stew does add files to the distribution he's unable to
regenerate the hdlists files and so on. THis makes doing network
installs off the mirrors impossible.
Frankly, the Mandrake-devel/cooker/ppc mirrors are pretty much worthless
for testing. The only reasonable way to test is to use the ISOs that
Stew produces for us and then update select packages from the mirrors.
I guess the way I see this is. Either Mandrake isn't truly committed to
producing a quality PPC distribution or this is already a dead project
as far as they see it. I really can't see how hard it can be to give
the primary person working on the distribution access to update it's
files. X86 sure as heck doesn't have this problem.
So Mandrake if you're going to abandon us or just don't care please let
us know so we can spend our time on something worthwhile. It'll really
be too bad because at this point in time Mandrake is already the best
PPC distribution there is. But I find it difficult to see it moving
forward without such simple support as Stew being able to update the
files on the cluster that get shoved out to the mirrors.
If you feel the same way please speak up. Perhaps if enough of us speak
up about this issue Mandrake will either realize there is a market for
the product or realize the mistake in not allowing Stew to update the
distribution. Furthermore, I encourge you all if you haven't already
done so to make a donation to Mandrake and flag it for the PowerPC Port.
You can do so here: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/donations/
--
Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://ben.reser.org
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless,
whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism
or the holy name of liberty and democracy? - Ghandi
--
----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
System Administrator/Network Engineer
Webmaster/Web developer
LatinoMixed.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
-- Kin Hubbard, "Abe Martin's Sayings"
