[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday, January 6, 2019

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

[GSmartControl:]

> It has saved me a good deal of time with my used machines which
> developed problems and isolated it to aged hard drives which are
> easily and quickly replaced at relatively low cost these days.

To be sure, and glad to hear it.  My point, though, is that
GSmartControl is not what's doing the work, but rather the smartmontools
console-type tools, which is really what people needed to know about.
GSmartControl is just a thin GUI layer on top of smartmontools.  It's
mentioned as such here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmontools

[Fatdog64:]

> And when you exit it offers to create a Save File on the hard disk...

Not intending to derogate that in any way, but most live distros have
done that all the way back to the grandfather of them all, Knoppix,
starting in 2000.

> That was only 4 years of support from the time the iBook was released.
> But the user suggestion to get online by turning off the firewall
> makes me queasy.

Indeed.  And part of my point is that a proprietary OS having been
completely unmaintained for at least ten years is queasy-making enough
even without that.

> I have found Distrowatch now has a good tool for finding releases that
> support the PPC and that there are about 5 or 6 respectable
> candidates.  Which ever Joseph wants I will do my best to get it into
> his hands.

Yeah, and I was at first surprised to see that Debian is no longer
listed on Distrowatch as having support for powerpc architecture -- but
it turns out that that is _correct_, for a reason that may be initially
non-obvious:

There have been a number of variations on the PowerPC CPU, and pretty
much all of the _current_ CPUs are dubbed the 'ppc64el', which is
basically the IBM POWER 64-bit processors -- not the same as ordinary
64-bit or 32-bit PowerPC (dubbed the 'powerpc' and 'ppc64'
architectures, respectively).  And Debian dropped everything but 64-bit
POWER a long time ago (among this chip family).

Basically, the powerpc and ppc64 archs have been dead for a long time, e.g.,
my wife Deirdre, who used to work at Apple, tells me that Apple's last
PowerPC model computer was released in 2005.  All G4 PowerPC Macintoshes
were 32-bit, thus the 'powerpc' architecture.  Which as you say limits 
the currently feasible distros to about 5 or 6.