On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Ken Mays <maybird1776 at yahoo.com> wrote: > >However, PS3's and g4 powermacs are still on the expensive side. I > >can't afford one in either case. What I can afford though is an old > >newworld G3 machine ( bondi imac or similar ) , they can be had for > >under $50 these days. I've given up hope trying to get my 44p booting > >off the net, and I don't know where to begin coaxing GRUB2 on to the > >thing. I've successfully netbooted a powermac ( mac mini actually... ) > >before, so I know apple's OFW implementation works. I was thinking > >then of picking up some ancient apple kit & having a go at making it > >work properly. > > We can get a "reference" PowerPC motherboard designed to our specs. if we > want to go the path of getting old G3/G4 computers we should settle on a few > that are 'open' enough with the glue logic so we can support the LSIs > properly. > Apple does have docs on their computers and internal chips - but they > changed so much per series that you'd spend more time supporting the > variations of 'glue logic' chips than doing anything else constructive. > > Using a single *open* reference PowerPC e600-based platform jointly designed > by those involved (the braintrust) is key....
Fabbing our own motherboards would leave us in the same boat we're in now; namely, having a restricted platform that nobody has access to that doesn't reflect any real world machines. It's pointless even entertaining such an idea. Furthermore, the cost of such an endeavor would far exceed the cost of simply picking up a pile of PlayStation3's and going that route ( Linux and at least NetBSD both boot on PS3, and IIRC the hypervisor is fairly well documented on that machine ). So I figure that if we're not going to find a cheap and easily available machine like the 44p or powermac to use as a reference, the next most logical step is to pick the playstation -- PGP Public Key 0x437AF1A1 Available on hkp://pgp.mit.edu
