As already published one year ago on our PowerPC Notebook project website we publish here the same call, as is still needed and welcomed help, even if already collaborate a fair number of volunteer.
If you want to help to enrich our wiki Debian PowerPC Starters Manual, you are welcome.
As you probably know, the PowerPC Notebook team had already selected Debian 9 (Stretch) OS, as it seemed to offer a lot of advantages (DFSG, Altivec, compatibility etc…). Because of this, the Debian team has decided to remove powerpc (Big Endian) from its release architectures for the upcoming Debian 9 (Stretch) and Debian testing (Stretch) powerpc repositories have been removed. Besides that, they will keep ppc64el (Little Endian) as a release architecture (For those of you who don’t know the difference between powerpc, ppc64el (and ppc64) – check the short summary on the end of this message).
One of the reasons of this decision was an apparent lack of porters/maintainers/testers – Although the powerpc Debian team includes some very competent, motivated and reactive people.
Some of us are willing to take the Debian powerpc road, but we need volunteers, people willing to give some of their time to the Debian powerpc community, to learn, test, fix bugs etc…
This does not suggest we don’t keep a “plan B” – by testing another distribution. It is just that Debian powerpc works well on current 32 bits and 64 bits machines, and we can try to keep this situation.
If you have a 32 or 64 bits PowerPC machine, and want to join us in keeping Debian powerpc alive, contact us.
Short summary about powerpc / ppc64 / ppc64el :
- powerpc is the historical Debian PowerPC port (1997). It works on 32 and 64 bits Big Endian PowerPC (G3/G4/G5 and newer freescale/NXP chips). That’s what you would use on your PowerMac/PowerBook/Genesi/
Amiga machines. Note that is supports Altivec, which accelerates greatly some applications (video, graphics, image processing). - ppc64 (Big Endian) was supposed to be used on 64 bits Big Endian PowerPC only (G5 and newer freescale/NXP chips). It has some advantages over the first but currently is not so well supported as powerpc.
- ppc64el (Little Endian) started with Debian 8 Jessie. It works on newer Power chips from IBM (for servers). Despite some newer freescale/NXP chips can also be used in Little Endian mode (but without Altivec) they can not be used with ppc64el as this version is compiled with VSX (Vector Scalar eXtension) enabled.