[TriLUG] In Praise of Linux PPC

[Ken Mink]

Hello Everyone,
  I just got done with a little personal project and thought I might relate
my experience here. I had an old 300A Celeron system that I was using as my
main home server. It handled DNS, NFS, SMTP, IMAP, Apache, etc, etc for my
home network. This machine was running CentOS 4.2. It had a couple of drives
running mirrored. I also had an old Blue and White Apple G3 sitting around.
Rather, it was being sat upon. I was using it as stool. It's a 300MHz
processor as well. I decided to retire the Intel box and replace it with the
Mac.
  I went with Ubuntu PPC Server 5.10. After some fighting with yaboot to try
to get / running on a mirrored device(it can't), I got everything installed
and configured. Over the past week I've been moving services and data over.
I cut everything over last night and am quite happy with the results. The
one thing I am impressed with the difference in responsiveness. Both
machines are 300MHz and have the same memory. Both are running with the
majority of the filesystems in logical volumes on top of a large RAID1 md
device. The PPC machine is so much quicker. I know PPC and x86 are different
architectures and MHz to MHz perform differently. I just wasn't expecting
the vast difference that I am seeing. The B&W is also very quiet in
comparison and the clam shell case design make working on the internals a
breeze.
  I apologize for the long winded post. I hope everyone has a happy new
year.

Ken

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" 'Necessity' is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it
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