Joseph Jezak

So, I've been asked three times in as many days if Ubutunu's discussion about potentially dropping PowerPC as a supported platform is an indicator of Gentoo/PowerPC's future.

Simple answer? No. :)

Gentoo/PowerPC is here to stay. Ubunutu is free to allocate their resources as they see fit, but I don't see the point in dropping a platform that is still actively developed. Consider that if the Playstation3 sells even a tenth of the PS2 units sold, there will be an additional 10 million PowerPC systems that can run PowerPC linux out of the box. Genesi's Efika is now shipping and there are plenty of affordable PowerPC Macs still available in the Used market. All 3 of the new gaming consoles have PowerPC processors, really, things don't look so bad. Cut and run? Not us! Sure, our target audience may change somewhat to better support non-apple machines, but still, the Gentoo/PowerPC port is just as viable as it ever has been. :)

Aside from keeping the doomsday folks quiet, I've been busy working on an embedded board (Xilinx ML403) for a university project. It was really simple to configure a uclibc root and get Linux booting, all using Gentoo of course. :) When I finish with the project I'll try to document the process in case anyone else is planning on using one of these boards. In any case, big thanks to the Gentoo Embedded team for their great work on making this so easy and for giving me another reason why Gentoo is still the distro that best meets my needs.