richmond62 wrote:I have several bones to pick with people who make Linux distros, and especially with Mark Shuttleworth.
From the Ubuntu PPC wiki:
PowerPC was an officially supported architecture for Ubuntu between versions 4.10 and 6.10. From 7.04 onwards it is a community supported port.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPC
It's very generous of the community to step in to maintain PPC builds of Ubuntu for that ever-smaller audience, but Mark Shuttleworth is not responsible for that build. On the contrary, his company donates server space and some community support to assist that community effort.
If you have an issue with PPC, your bone-picking may be better directed at Apple than Shuttleworth. Apple maintained their role as the only major computer vendor attempting to use PPC long after the rest of the world had switched to x86, as Apple themselves eventually did as well. Had they made that jump sooner, PPC would have been purged from the pool of available platforms that much earlier, and this would not be affecting you today.
Or conversely, if Apple remained committed to their PPC choice you would also not be in the position you're in today.
Either way, AFAIK Mark Shuttleworth was not consulted in Apple's decision to either adopt or later abandon the PPC architecture.
There is a lot of Ballyhoo on their websites about using Linux to "breath new life into old computers", and
that sounds super until one realises that what they mean by "old computers" are models that are less than 5 years old,
and have at least half a Gig of RAM.
What is not really being catered to is the bunch of 10-15 year old computers being dumped all over Africa and so on with Pentium 3 processors and 128 MB RAM.
So, obviously, the name 'Ubuntu' has gone sour.
For older machines you are correct: instead of "Ubuntu" you would be looking for "Lubuntu" or "Xubuntu", both of which receive generous funding from Mark Shuttleworth, and both of which work surprisingly well on older hardware (I use Lubuntu on an Atom 230-powered nettop and it's been amazingly reliable).
For markets where resources are even more scarce than any fully-featured modern Debian-based distro can address well, projects like OLPC have been working with other distros to providing computing resources for such unusually sparse systems. OLPC itself ships with Sugar, but there are many other distros available for unusually modest systems as well, including the popular Puppy Linux which is so slender it can even run entirely from RAM.
There's also Raspian, the Debian variant stripped down to work on the Raspberry Pi, which is likely far cheaper to ship to Africa new than to try shipping a large, heavy 15-year-old Pentium 3 box with its much greater power requirements, more restrictive system resources, and insufficiently-available replacement parts.
And for those who have 15-year-old hardware that still runs, Puppy Linux and others will serve them well with modern security features beyond any OS that shipped with the machine.
If you're working with any NGOs supplying computing resources to Africa, there are far more cost-effective options than 15-year-old hardware. I have friends who work with the OLPC, Internet in a Box, and other related projects, and am on the advisory board of Kids Care Everywhere, and would be happy to help share resources with such groups if needed.