I’m actually interested in bringing back PowerPC support to the Linux community, both in 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Considering Mandriva did support PPC64 at least, why not target older 32 bit hardware as well? PowerPC based Macs like the PowerMac G3’s/G4’s/G5’s and other Macs and hardware that is of the same architecture (Talos 2) would be amazing!
Nobody on the current team has access to any PPC hardware. If you want to do it yourself or donate a couple of boxes, we’d certainly help though…
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I have a dual-core G5 running OSX 10.5.8. Previously I tried to get Linux running there, but it turned to be very difficult. The ‘wind farm’ driver does not always work well and your great looking aluminium G5 case starts working very loud. It also generates a lot of heat and makes me worried about climate change.
Next, certain OSS software had never been ported to PPC. We have no new versions of GCC, nor Rust at all, no Chromium. But what is really critical is the absence of good video drivers for Linux PPC. My G5 carrier nvidia geforce 4 MX, which is perfectly accelerated in OSX, but shows poor performance under Linux PPC with nouveau.
I tried Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian PPC on my G5 and after a while a got back to OSX 10.5.8, which seems to be the only viable choice. Nothing else works decently on this hardware.
So, you see, OpenMandriva will unlikely work with PowerPC hardware.