This website was created to produce a new PowerPC notebook.
We are looking for people that really have passion for innovation.
The passion for innovation and for this project have already motivated a producer to start the design of the motherboard of this PowerPC Notebook.
To make it produced and designed near our needs your participation makes the difference.
For us it’s nice to help and promote small hardware/software producers that really like doing something for innovation and for the progress of our society.
The GNU/Linux PowerPC notebook project wants to group together passionate people like you. These people with their involvement will make the difference to produce and design a new open source PowerPC notebook.
This is already a concrete project in early stage of design; this notebook will go in production when we will have joined together a relatively small but strong community of enthusiasts.
The idea for this project was born from Roberto Innocenti (even if a producer was already thinking about it), and there are dozens of people who are working and pushing the project.
Below all the people that already have pushed our project and like to make public that information, this list will be updated frequently ( if we have forgot someone please contact us).
old Amiga which was my second computer and the reason of studying Computer
Science. I also own a PPC Mac Mini which runs Morphos. I’m helping this
project as a Spanish translator as I think a PPC notebook and Linux could
be a perfect combination but of course I would like to see other Operative
Systems running on it (AmigaOS and Morphos).
My undergrad/B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology in USA. Am nearing completion of Masters Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in USA. I’ve just completed a significant “capstone” project semester using two kinds of Arduinos and a linux pc implementing a “smarthome” lichting and ceiling fan control system using Zigbee wireless control signalling.
I have about 16 years experience in semiconductor/chip design, including 5 years integrating in Verilog Arm Soc chips and simulating them with functional test software written in C.
I’m a fan of Amiga computers, which are currently based on PowerPC architecture. I’ve been pondering how to get a ppc laptop for about a decade, and am happy to see such a project with more than one person involved.
I studied Computer Engineering at Drexel University to learn how to build computers and further my software skills.
Most of my career has been a combination of writing embedded software or designing embedded hardware. My designs have included various technologies including 80486, 68360, MPC860, PPC745, Stratix FPGA’s, various CPLDs, and several members of the STM32F family ranging from STM32F2 to STM32F7.
I currently work as a Hardware Design Engineer creating schematics and board layouts from customer requirements.
Although much of the things we do is somehow oriented by marketing and publicity, I believe it is important to offer people the right to run the software of their choice on the platform of their choice while protecting their essentials freedoms.
It is also as vital to have different platforms to work on.
Born and raised in South Dakota, USA. Hold a bachelor’s in Computer Science from Dakota State University and just started my Master’s of Applied Computer Science with a specialization in Cyber Security there as well in the summer of 2016. I’m a programmer at heart and have experience with multiple languages but do system administrator work for my full-time job for the time being.
Became a PPC fanatic after buying a G5 PowerMac right after the PPC -> Intel transition for Apple. It was disappointing at the time but the more I played around with and studied the unique PPC architecture, the more I fell in love with it. I then learned to run Debian and other Linux distributions on older PPC hardware. I’m just starting to immerse myself in the Amiga culture and look forward to purchasing an x5000 when they are available. I have my own PPC Linux blog over at http://powerofpowerpc.blogspot.com.
the Polytechnic of Milan. Interested since ever in programming and Unix.
I believe in Open Source as a way for expanding freedom, reducing
obsolescence and vendor lock-in, so am actively engaged in its
development. Mainly I am Developer and Maintainer in GNUstep and its
Applications and love to take care of a wide platform support for it,
different OSs and CPUs; I love the Objective-C language and which is
very suited for this goal.
I own and like to work on PowerPC (naturally!), MIPS, ARM CPUs, running
different versions of BSD and Linux.
Lately I became one of the two “founders” of Arctic Fox, a browser
forked from PaleMoon and Firefox that attempts to enhance support of
BigEndian and legacy OS versions.
Since then, I’ve been growing my interest for computers. I started collecting old computers from friends, neighbors and family.
He has worked on the most used technologies for web, but he always keeps informed about news in the web.
He works primarily on the LAMP stack, but also squeezes the eye to Python/Django and Ruby/ROR.
GNU / Linux has been love at first sight, and since then it was never abandoned!
I’ve been always interested in the history of computing, exotic different hardware, and how it evolves, etc.
On the personal side, I love photography and music – I guess I love too many things to have time to all of them. And I miss the times when we had different processor platforms to choose from.
Over the years became a real PPC fanatic and uses PPC hardware daily.
Owns 12 computers at home on which 5 are PPC based.
Has experience demoing hardware and software and managing forums. Other interests: Pen and paper Roleplaying games, cooking and meat.
This project is VERY exciting to me and other ‘post Mactel era’ PPC developers. A quick question: Is there a possibility of a Free/OpenBSD flavor or option in this new system? Have noted a lot of long-term stability/usability issues with Linux (Ubuntu) and would really hope that BSD/Unix will be workable, as it has such great stability.
I’m happy that this project is VERY exciting to you!
So I invite you to join the team!
About Free/OpenBSD option depend if Free/OpenBSD run on modern new PowerPC cpu. I’m not an expert of Free/OpenBSD… Please update us if you have more info about the PowerPC cpu that Free/OpenBsd support. Thanks
OpenBSD already offers a PowerPC version, so porting should be either easy or not required.
As you might have heard, Jordan Hubbard, who helped to design OSX has left Apple to work on FreeBSD. Will reach out to him and ask if what he thinks the chances are of a PPC port, or source-code availably for such a process. BTW, are you all shooting for straightforward G4 32/64 performance, or ‘Big-Power’ (G5+) code base?
Lastly, are you accepting submissions for body/case designs??
Thanks Again!!!!
Adam I think your idea about PPC port is a great idea ,the PowerPC Notebook will have a 64bit PowerPC multi-tread processor with AltiVec accelerator, that can run Debian and Ubuntu powerpc 32bit.
It’s not needed a body/case design, we have already solved this problem. 😀
If you contact the NG Amiga community, with emphasis on the companies of acube aeon tech you might find some friends, and depending on your intent and genuineness, help.
Dear friend, thanks for your infos, this Open Source PowerPC Notebook project is open to any community , groups, person that want to produce a PowerPC notebook, so are welcome people from different communities like FreeBsd,OpenBsd, Amiga and others. I do this project for passion, for free as volunteer, and I search people like me that want to push this project,improve it give to it volume.
I hope we can get it to AmigaNG http://www.amigaos.net/
Sure! I hope the same.
Very cool. I’ve been doign a thought-experiment design of such a thing myself for several years, and have begun a graduate school Masters Degree in Electrical Engienering to get into some study topics such as signal integrity toward this goal. As you mention Altivec and 64bit, I must assume that you are talking Freescale e6500 core processors, which I’m very happy aout, and also very happy to see that MXM graphics is mentioned. I would love to participate in this discussion, btu am not able to attend Milan. Will there be an online method of participating in Milan discussions, or following discussions after that?
I have been told that my own idea wants too much, but from my point of view I would likely only do this one time, and thus I want the result to be relevant for as far into the future as I could make it, and as expandable as a laptop using industry standards can be. (MXM, ExpresCard2, and of course miniPCIe, MSATA, NGFF/M.2, whatever is most sensible) and I’m curious what your view of expansion is. I would also pair SoC style CPU with southbridge, as A_Eon did with their Nemo / AmigaOne X1000 desktop board for sound, USB3, and other things missing from current SoC.
Is the hardware design to be open, or is the hardware encumbered by NDAs and this is merely intended for open-source PPC OS?
Bill very good your background! After some requests I have decided to record the presentation of the project at LinuxDay in Milan.
The design will not be open but we accept suggestions…
After the presentation in Milan,we will organize discussions with the people interested.
I’m curious if you have custom casework in mind, or reuse an existing PC laptop casework.
We plan to use existent notebook casework
Can’t wait to see a PowerPC notebook!!!
I’d be _very_ interested in porting FreeBSD to this!
That’s fine! Let’s join the team!
I hope this project becomes more or less cheap and in the future can run AmigaOS or MorphOS operating systems.
Cheap is often difficult but it’s an important idea to keep in mind and we’ll keep it 🙂
Hi guys I can help with porting lubuntu.
wonderful! Join the team 😀 thanks!
+1 For the AmigaOS-track here. Me and many others are just dying waiting for a laptop running the slim, powerful and ultra efficient AmigaOS 4.1. Any specs you can give us relating to the new hardware would be helpful. I’m not involved personally in the development/testing of AmigaOS any longer but could point them in this direction if they haven’t noticed this project already.
Hi Stefan, some specs are already published at faq http://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/ , as soon as we will have new public specs we will share it