[Mageia-dev] We must port Mageia to ARM and PowerPC!

[Arnaud Patard (Rtp)]

Maarten Vanraes <maarten.vanraes at gmail.com> writes:

> Op dinsdag 22 februari 2011 23:53:01 schreef André Machado:
>> I was watching now and I realized that both mageia and Mandriva have ports
>> for both i586 and x64 architetures.
>> 
>> When Mageia is released, she will compete directly with Mandriva, even
>> though this is not your intention, Many Mandriva users will not want to
>> migrate to Mageia and here is the clever.
>> 
>> Nowadays, they are increasingly common netbooks and tablets with ARM
>> processors. In addition, there are still people with PowerPC Macs or
>> PlayStations, which also use this processor.
>> 
>> If we port Mageia for these architectures, we can grab a larger share of
>> users, including fans of Mandriva, which could run a distro similar to
>> that love on machines that do not support it.
>> 
>> Of course, this is not a trivial task and maybe cannot be done right now
>> but think in the short term, this should be viable and will help spread
>> the distro. It should not be difficult to find someone who has a computer
>> with these features and want to build the distro. Of course, Mageia
>> Foundation is busy with Alpha1 and a port would require more tests. Maybe
>> for next year? I ask what are the difficulties in doing this?
>> 
>> Of course we don't need have a large range of architetures such like Debian
>> or NetBSD, but these - ARM and PowerPC - are essentials.
>
> iinm rtp (forgot real name, sorry) plans on doing ARM.

Not only I plan to work on ARM but I'd like to work on ARM and MIPS,
like I did at Mandriva. The MIPS port will arrive only after having ARM
support in good shape. I've started to work on ARM but nothing to show
atm.
As regards powerpc, you'll have to find at least one persone who will
maintain the port (more is preferred as it's a lot of work).
Support for arches different than x86/x86_64 can only be there if there
are real maintainers and testers because breakages happen really often
there and get often unnoticed.

Arnaud