On Mon, 2016-11-21 at 13:33 -0500, Mike Erwin wrote:
Perfect timing! I've been struggling to install Fedora on a
PowerMac
quad-G5 much of this weekend. Burning another install disc as I type.
My interests are software development and graphics. The recent interest and
reason for installing is to optimize some common libraries for VMX. Don't
own any newer Power hardware, just several PowerMacs (G3 to G5) and two
QS22 blades.
Running and enjoying Fedora on Intel/AMD machines. Would prefer to run
Fedora on PPC but open to any distro that is up-to-date and works. Latest
Debian is giving trouble too, so it's still a toss-up!
G3 G4 and G5 are now ridiculously old and the community is not actively
supporting them.
You might try Debian / Ubuntu which provides some support.
https://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/trusty/release/
As Josh said we are supporting POWER7 and newer for Big Endian and
POWER8 and newer for Little Endian. Also the Linux community is in the
process of deprecating 32-bit processors in general which includes
G3/G4.
Also note that the OpenPOWER Foundation effort starts with POWER8
processors. The trademarked term OpenPOWER does not apply to PowerPC
before PowerISA 2.07 and POWER8.
Basically we have moved on and P7/P8 is the hardware that is readily
available. G5/970 are PowerISA V 2.01+ while PowerISA V 2.07 is current.
That covers the different of over 500 new instructions.
If you want Fedora to support old hardware then you (and like minded
folks) need to contribute the development effort and patches for this
support.