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[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote:

>> Ding! Nobody publishes volume discounting unless they want folks not
>> having the requisite volume to still lobby for the rock bottom deal.
>
>Which leaves the poor "hobbyist" with an AMD64 or PPC64 box
>feeling like a chump for paying $792/yr for RHEL.
>
>It is an absolute coup for Intel that RHEL cost the same on a
>US$2K AMD64 box as it does on a US$7-10K over-priced and
>under-performing IA-64 box.  Development and support-wise, I
>can see why they should have cost parity.  But I can also see
>SuSE and Mandrake sales rising rapidly ...
>
>Fortunately, said "hobbyist" will soon be running 64-bit FC1. :-)

Shall I add your name to the "possible Fedora Core/AMD64 
volunteers" list?  Also, while I'm at it...

Who all out there is interested in spending their own personal
time volunteering to work on an AMD64 version of Fedora Core?
The main goal would be to have it an officially released Fedora 
Core 'branded' release, but even if we can't gather enough 
volunteers to make it an official release, there is most likely 
enough people interested to make an unofficial release something 
like what Tom Callaway has done with his Sparc port of RHL 
located at http://www.auroralinux.org

The simple stuff is rebuilding packages and fixing minor bugs, I 
don't think we need many people for that as most stuff builds and 
runs perfectly fine now as is.  The areas needing help would be 
in kernel development/debugging, probably glibc and gcc, and 
other toolchain issues (although I know of no issues currently).  
Also needed more than developers are QA testers, and people 
itching to beta test the results on real AMD64 hardware and file 
bug reports.

I don't know how official we can make this in the short term, or 
how long it will take to get things off the ground, but I don't 
believe it is that much work personally, as one person outside of 
Red Hat has already gotten rawhide AMD64 packages rolled into 
installable ISO images using a recompiled RHEL3 kernel src.rpm, 
so it's more a matter of organizing the effort, determining where 
it will be officially compiled/built, and by whom, and where the 
community can pick up the results.

This could be a fantastic way to kickstart some of the community 
aspect of Fedora to the next level, and is IMHO a wonderful 
opportunity for everyone to work more closely with each other.

I'll spend as much personal time as I can on this, if there is 
enough community interest.  AMD64 is IMHO going to be very 
widespread in a short period of time, due to it being consumer 
mass marketed.  Wether or not the masses really need 64bit 
computing doesn't matter IMHO, as they'll have 64bit computers 
anyway.  Can we all work towards getting them a kick arse 64bit 
cutting edge OS to run on it as well?  I hope so!  ;o)

Shall I set up a special development mailing list for this 
subproject, or does everyone think fedora-devel is sufficient?


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat