2010

Fri, May 7

<17:38 EEST> Yesterday was my last chemistry exam, and now it's time to focus on other interests such as theatre, music, software and hardware. Last night I got around to hacking an openoffice-bin ebuild for ppc. It is only in the past two weeks that I would find it useful, as my quest for getting a Powerbook G4 is now complete. I did not get the last and best high-res model I always wanted, but the A1106 is close enough for my tastes.

This is a kind of turning point, in that it is not obviously more powerful than my previous laptop, which is now on sale. In a way it is a welcome development that you no longer need ridiculous upgrades in CPU and memory, but instead you can focus on more interesting features. Netbooks are a notable testament to this; new Atom-powered models are considerably weaker than these laptops from 2005. But the Atom is a 32-bit x86, and there are far more interesting architectures, for example the ARM Touchbook and the MIPS Lemote Yeeloong. I still do not have a netbook, but at least I can get rid of x86.

Thus I am finally putting my money where my mouth is, when it comes to x86 and supposedly better architectures. I must admit that PowerPC is not always better; for example, decoding H.264 video is slightly slower on this 1.67 GHz G4, compared to the 1.6 GHz Pentium M 725. In part, this is probably due to a slower CPU bus. Some CPU-bound numerical work, on the other hand, is immensely faster. As for video decoding, there are exciting developments awaiting with the open-source Radeon driver.

Linux on PowerPC is really an acid test of open source. With x86 and amd64 there is lots of closed software for Linux in general use, such as video card drivers, Skype and Flash. None of that for PowerPC. But once you have open source and a suitable compiler, the architecture does not really matter. You can choose it on a technical basis, such as power consumption and computing power, instead of arbitrary commercial interests.

There is no closed software I particularly miss on this machine. In fact, the lack seems to make things more predictable, especially when it comes to Flash. Ironically, my only machine with Skype and Flash fluently working is the Nokia N800, running Linux on ARM, albeit the versions are rather old and limited. Aluminically, I now have a stronger sense of what open source is capable of, and I have no hesitations in moving further into MIPS or ARM in the future. Meanwhile, it must be said that amd64 (x86-64) is the best for some operations, so I keep using one in my media center.