Ubuntu Announce February

The PowerPC Architecture
------------------------

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.

--
Matt Zimmerman
Chairman, Ubuntu Technical Board

I'm sorry, but to me this sounds like a dead distro for PowerPC. Like I said, I'm an outsider to Ubuntu, but my feeling is that there is pretty much no "community" development for Ubuntu. Everything is done by the main developers. Am I wrong?

The three distributions are:
OpenSUSE - Desktop, Manager: Peter Czanik
Debian - Server, Manager: Sven Luther
Gentoo - Developers, Manager: Pieter van den Abeele

I think for our purposes, Gentoo fits best. We have more active developers there than anywhere, and seemingly a lot more talent to draw upon (SuSE and Debian, for us, seems to be just Peter and Sven respectively. It's easily possible to overwork one guy who has to oversee an entire distribution working on our hardware!)

Neko:
OK. Like I said, I'm an outsider. Ubuntu and Caonical are too close to each other.. It's hard to know what development is done in-house, by the 70+ people in the London-office, and by unpaid volunteers.

For those, who don't have mkvmlinuz or mkzimage, or it fails on them: I created install and boot kernels for Ubuntu Feisty.

http://genesi.hu/ubuntu/feisty_inst
http://genesi.hu/ubuntu/feisty_boot

These are for the 'Alternate' version, as I try to avoid 'Desktop', as that's too much Windows like for me :-) I mean, the installer, the end result is the same, but 'Alternate' is a bit more flexible.