[arch-ports] PPC port status

[Alexander Baldeck]

hey ports ml,

regarding jason's request for us to present status of the port we work 
on i'd like to present a
summary of what my initial goal was and while i was working on to 
achieve it has been going on:

back in late summer 2004 i got a few old Power Macintosh machines for 
free. right from the start
i wanted to run linux on them. me being an archer thought about porting 
it. first thing to do was
to install another distro first, in my case it was debian as it is 
working pretty well on all platforms
it supports.

first thing to do is - in my opinion - getting current/base to work as a 
standalone system. for that
one needs to start with the following packages in order:

    binutils
    gcc
    glibc

    zlib
    libtar
    ncurses
    readline
    bash
    pacman

when i had these installed to a chroot, i started from scratch - to get 
rid of references to debian - from
within the chroot using makepkg.

if all goes well you now have clean packages to start buildin the rest 
of current, this can be a pretty
timeconsuming and stressing process. fortunately i didn't have to modify 
that many PKGBUILDs. :)

one advice:
if you compile pacman first and use makepkg from the start, it may 
happen that the md5 check is not working
properly. at least that was how it was on ppc32. no idea about others.


Archlinux/PPC Status:
==============

it's been almost a year now - i am after all a one man army - and i have 
a complete current and a rather small part of
extra built and working fine.

current (100%)
extra     (30%)
   
the installer is still not working well mainly due to the lack of time.

right now i am in the process of migrating current to GCC 4.0.1. for 
that i stopped to work on extra for i cannot manage it
on my own anyway. testing now has about 50% of current including X, a 
few window managers and other stuff to drive a
desktop system.



best regards,

alex / kth5