On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 12:12:25PM +0000, Peter Robinson wrote:
How was this handled in the case of PPC? My understanding is that
due
to legal reasons the Fedora Project never officially provided access
to PPC machines. There were a number of machines that users could get
access to that were provided by individuals but these were never
officially provided by the Fedora project.
It was very unsatisfactory. I had an account on David Woodhouse's
PPC64 machine -- I think it was a PS3 -- but there was no root access
so I couldn't install packages or test anything that needed root.
There's a number of cheap hardware becoming available such as
the
Raspberry Pi as well as development boards that are available for
either purchase or people can apply to be part of a developer program
to get either discount or free hardware. How was this supported with
PPC? The PPC hardware was a lot more expensive (either Apple devices
or IBM) than the readily available ARM devices.
PPC hardware was expensive. Even the Playstation 3 was an order of
magnitude more expensive than the upcoming ARM hardware. Of course,
as of *right now*, ARM hardware is also expensive (£250 for a minimal
server). We are still waiting to see if Raspberry Pi really becomes
mass-produced and available to all for cheap as chips.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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