Fedora PPC status & work in progress :)

[Phil Knirsch]

Hi everyone.

Just wanted to give you all a brief heads up that Fedora on PPC as a 
secondary arch is still alive and kicking and no dead horse!

On a more serious note, we've recently been catching up to the current 
Fedora 15 packages after PowerPC moved to secondary arch status after 
Fedora 12. This took a while, but thanks to pretty powerful builders and 
concentrated effort from the PowerPC team we've gotten pretty close to 
catching up by now.

The current focus is to get the installer to work properly again. With 
the switch to Lorax, the new unified initrd and other changes we hit a 
few problems recently, but at least we've had a successful install with 
the latest mash trees on a Power7 machine recently via DVD [1].

Discussions are still ongoing on how to solve the unified initrd size 
problem though as currently for Power6 or Power5 the new initrd is just 
too large to ever work, even if it would be better compressed. So we 
might have to go back to a 2 stage install process for PowerPC at least, 
but very likely with a dracut based 1st stage then.

Due to these installer problems we're probably not going to be able to 
have an official PowerPC release for Fedora 15, but the goal is to 
definitely get it done for Fedora 16.

Thanks to everyone working on getting PowerPC in Fedora back into shape!

For more information, feel free to visit the Fedora PowerPC wiki:

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC

Thanks & regards, Phil

[1] http://ppc.koji.fedoraproject.org/mnt/koji/scratch/karsten/iso/

-- 
Philipp Knirsch              | Tel.:  +49-711-96437-470
Supervisor Core Services     | Fax.:  +49-711-96437-111
Red Hat GmbH                 | Email: Phil Knirsch <pknirsch at redhat.com>
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D-70178 Stuttgart, Germany
Motd:  You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.