Back with a surprise

Hello everyone. I hope you have all been well. My apologies for falling off of the face of the earth. It is wild how time flies by. Enough about that though, it is time for the surprise.

There will be more details and plans shortly. It has already been quirky but hey, it is a G5 after all.

It is good to be back.

Why I finally ride the SSD train

For the longest time...  I was always against using SSD's, as reliability had been an issue for the first several years they were on the market.  Now however, I have discovered the Samsung 850 EVO series of 2.5" SSD's, and damn are they amazing.  I have one in my Sawtooth, and one in my late 2009 Mac mini.  The performance and reliability is amazing all-round.

As my Sawtooth relies on a PCI-M slot powered SATA 1 controller, I am limited to around 80MB/sec read and write, but the latency is incredibly good.  On my Intel mini, with SATA 2, I get sustained speeds of 270MB/sec read and 210MB/sec write.  It's also the most reliable boot drive I have ever used.  More on all this later.

I know this place has seemed dead in the last year or so, but I can assure you it's not.  There is still plenty of hits every day here, and I am starting to use my PowerPC systems more lately.  Also, I recently picked up a 1.5GHz 12" PowerBook G4 for next to nothing.  What a great machine.

I still have five PowerPC computers, so new content will come, and hopefully me posting will inspire the other authors.  *wink wink*  *nudge nudge*

Current state of Linux on PowerPC

I am sure most you have heard that Debian has dropped PowerPC as a release architecture.  If anyone is interested in the reading the meeting notes where it was discussed it can be found here. Basically it came down to lack of support. According to the Debian team there were no porters for PowerPC to maintain it as a release architecture. There is also the issue of outstanding bugs. An example is webkit2 is broken under PowerPC and it does not look like it is going to be fixed. The last version of firefox that works under PowerPC is 47. Yaboot has issues as well. In testing and sid you need to create a separate boot partition with ext2 in order for the kernel to load.

PowerPC will still be available in sid. There are some architectures that were once release that are only available there. However this does make the future of bleak. Already this decision is making an impact. The Ubuntu community is already considering dropping PowerPC for Lubuntu and Ubuntu-MATE. If you want to watch the hangout meeting where this is discussed you can see it here.

So where does that leave us who want to keep our PowerPC machines running a modern secure operating system? For G3, G4, and G5 machines there is the option of Gentoo. The learning curve is steep. However I have not heard discussions of dropping PowerPC. If you have a G5 machine then you also have the options of Fedora, and openSUSE. There is still an attempt to save PowerPC in Debain. The powerpc-notebook project is trying to get people together to help in testing and fixing bugs you can them on this email. You can also get involved in the debain-powerpc mailing list and #debian-ppc IRC channel.

Finally there are the BSDs. I prefer OpenBSD. It is pretty straightforward to get installed and it has the most binary packages for PowerPC. The one biggest drawback I have found is browser support. However sound and video playback work really well.

Please share your thoughts.