Blog Post

Article posted on Nov 19

Clarification on Finnix for PowerPC

Posted by Ryan Finnie on November 19, 2010, 3:07 am

Please don't sue me, Apple.

The people have spoken. Or at least, the people who use a certain RISC architecture.

I received a lot of mail and comments following the announcement that support for the PowerPC architecture was being dropped from Finnix, and the subsequent release of Finnix 100 as x86-only. Finnix was one of the few LiveCDs in the market with support for PowerPC, and many people use Finnix for administration of PowerPC systems, as I found out.

When I made the announcement, I left some wiggle room, stating, "I'm sure there will be one-off updates throughout the years, but PowerPC support will no longer be a release goal." I'd like to reiterate that this is still the policy, strictly speaking. Over the years, there have been releases that have been delayed due to PowerPC-specific bugs that had to be resolved before a release could be made for both supported architectures. However, after the show of support from PowerPC users, I am happy to announce that the "implied" policy has changed. PowerPC releases may not strictly be a release goal, but I now intend to produce PowerPC releases as a rule rather than an exception.

I've made some upgrades to the main Finnix PowerPC development machine (a G4 Mac Mini -- I have a more powerful dual-proc G4 MDD, but it sounds like a jet engine when running), and I expect, barring unforseen circumstances, that Finnix 101 will be released with both x86 and PowerPC support.

9 Comments
Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

9 Responses to “Clarification on Finnix for PowerPC”

khuy86 says:

November 20, 2010 at 12:11 pm

KTHX!

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klaatu says:

December 1, 2010 at 2:05 pm

Many thanks!! I've been looking and looking for a distro that is still committed to PPC. Your new announcement here sounds a lot better than the "we're dropping PPC" from most other distros. Thank you!

Email me privately if you're in desperate need of dev hardware. PPC boxes I got. And even a few laptops.

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Douglas says:

December 2, 2010 at 9:50 am

Good news, very good news. Now on main page, we just read "Finnix 100 125 MiB ISO", with no clarification for which platform is that. And yes, as I said before, if you need any help on porting, just mail me.

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Matt Brock says:

December 8, 2010 at 2:44 am

Having only just discovered how incredibly useful Finnix is for administering our Xserve G5s, I'm very pleased to hear this!

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Walter J. Ferstl says:

December 25, 2010 at 4:31 am

Thanks a lot for your support of the PPC platform!

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freespace says:

March 1, 2011 at 11:06 pm

I thank you sir for your continued support of an orphaned platform :D

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Douglas Robertson says:

April 4, 2011 at 11:57 am

Thank you for PPC support! I recently had an iBook G4's hard drive go TU. Would not mount under OS X and Disk Utility would not repair after booting from OS disk. Disk Warrior was purchased and I anxiously waited for the CDROM in the mail; after it arrived, Disk Warrior could not see the disk. Searched and searched for a PPC liveCD which brought me here. Burned me a copy, booted and was able to mount the hard drive. Mounted a USB drive and transfered all of my data!
Thank you Finnix!

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MJL says:

June 26, 2011 at 5:05 pm

Hello Ryan, this looks to be a great tool for the MAC mini PPC (G4) but I've run into a snag. I am using a 1920 x1080 display which is detected but when setting this it goes blank (under normal OS X) because the ATI graphics card is not able to support that resolution (inspite of it showing up). This results that I can maximum display 1360 x 768 on my LG W2261V.

When booting your live CD the CD seems to boot fine but then the screen flickers a few times during the boot process (at different stages) but then in the end finishes up displaying nothing. Tried to boot in debug mode but same thing. Have not got a DVI => VGA adapter to test (uses a lower frequency for the GP), a bit above my head. Is it possible to set maximum display size when booting (my Unix is > 20 years old and I want to get back into it). Thanks!

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MJL says:

June 26, 2011 at 8:34 pm

Update: Just bought DVI => VGA adapter and now display works fine.

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