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.