Fedora PPC things...

[Colin Charles]

CC'ing fedora-devel-list because there are some things that need to be
sorted for a possible FC-4/ppc _release_

Now, a list of known issues:

0. this boot.iso + nfs installation system has to go away - so we need
to give anaconda love

1. out of the box video detection - system-config-display needs to be
hacked on to recognise all the common Mac hardware bits out there. We
can't be pushing Xautoconfig or something similar... but we can lean on
it for inspiration if need be

2. anaconda and partitioning - auto partitioning possibly still fails (I
don't think the Apple Bootstrap partition gets created); running
yabootconfig automatically after installation, with an appropriate
initrd and so on needs to happen (we can't depend on users breaking out
into a shell)

3. sound is still relatively broken - dmasound_pmac tends to work, but
is not the default config. system-config-soundcard definitely needs some
work to make it play well with the Macs

4. power management - we need either pmud or pbbuttonsd. The latter has
received no love from most fedora/ppc users, so pmud seems to be the
winner, I'd guess. We need this included in Core (building only for ppc,
and possibly later ppc64). We know yellow dog add some nice patches for
disabling the touchpad in pmud - I guess the package maintainer can be
free to include such patches at will if need be

5. updates - we can't have david woodhouse (dwmw2) grabbing packages
from the RH build system and having to host them at ftp.linux.org.uk -
we need a better mechanism. i.e. the normal way package updates go out,
can the ppc and ppc64 packages go out with them too? This might involve
some policy change at Red Hat, so can someone in the know, speak up?

6. back to the topic of power management; there are some patches out
there that help G4 iBooks and newer powerbooks sleep (and wake up).
They're not in the upstream kernel.org kernel, but with good benh
approval (!), we might consider patching the kernel to make it more
useful. dwmw2 currently builds kernels with these patches enabled

7. we'll be upfront about modems and Airport Extreme probably never
working for free. Modems have drivers at linuxant (though they still
might be flaky with our stack size in the kernel), but the Airport
Extreme stuff is probably a no go (not yet at least)

8. 64-bit support. I personally don't have a G5 or anything ppc64, but I
know that dwmw2 has one sitting at work, as probably does nasrat. We
need more 64-bit testing, and making sure that anaconda boots on them
too (if not we need more anaconda hacking). There have been reports that
things were (or are still) broken on a 64-bit arch
 
9. PegasosPPC (Genesi) makers of PPC boards have thought of getting
FC4/ppc to work on their machines. I'll be taking a look at this, though
does anyone else have such machines around?

10. spanking MiniMac support? 

I guess this is a list of outstanding issues that we need to fix before
Fedora Core 4 gets a PPC release. If I missed anything glaring, do add
on the the thread

Otherwise, lets get some C and Python hackers hacking on the packages
above, and making things "just work" for FC/ppc. PPC specific discussion
can take place at fedora-ppc at lists.infradead.org

-- 
Colin Charles, byte at aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, 
then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi