Fedora 16 Alpha for ppc64 hardware

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By: Brent Baude.  

I just wanted to bring some attention to the recent announcement around a Fedora 16 Alpha for ppc64.  Detials can be found in the release announcement.  While this is only an Alpha, it has proven to be a rather decent effort and quite stable.

For those with ppc64 hardware, I would encourage you to check out the release notes for the alpha.  This should give you some insight into any problems we have already identified. To find out where to download the Fedora 16 alpha ISOs, check out the https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/16-Alpha/ppc64/. 

This is a community-based effort and as such we encourage folks to participate. The best mechanism to speak with the team behind this effort is via IRC, where we hang out on freenode in #fedora-ppc.

For those interested, the default userland is 64-bit. It can also run 32-bit binaries and yum (the “wrapper” admin tool around rpm) does an excellent job of resolving dependencies for package installation. Suppose you want to install a package called “foo”, you can perform any of the following:

• yum install foo (which will install the 64bit version of foo)

• yum install foo.ppc64 (same as above)

• yum install foo.ppc (which will install the 32bit version of foo)

Fedora, and this alpha, is a a great way to see trends in the Linux community operating systems (for which the Enterprise Linux distributions generally follow). One example is the incorporation of things like systemd, the new style of System and Service manager. If you have packages with init daemons and the like, running things like this alpha will help you get ready for full support of systemd.

I'll continue to post more information on Fedora for ppc64 in the future. My hope is to not only bring status but perhaps introduce new functions, tips, and techniques for users of Fedora.

Brent