Electrical Schematics presentations, Yocto/Debian updates, Scratch

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Communications Team

Yocto project update

In the last weeks we created a custom desktop theme for LXQT and continued giving more stability to the current version of the distribution. At the same time we are trying to add more productivity applications but we are finding several problems. One of them is caused probably by the nvidia driver when Shotcut is launched, see here for more details and contact us if you think you can help.

Yocto LXQT PowerPC Desktop

Finally, we are updating our distribution from Yocto 2.4 Rocko to Yocto 2.6 Thud. We hope to have an stable version soon and thinking about giving access to a reduced group of people to test it.

Presentations:

Linux Day: Bergamo – Italy

The local Linux user group “BGlug” kindly accepted to include a speech about our activities during the LinuxDay of this year that was hosted at the local university of Bergamo (see picture).

The building of the University of Bergamo, where we had the speech.

Among other very interesting topics (see the complete programme here), we introduced the association, who we are, the goal of the laptop project and we explain how we want to reach such an ambitious goal. You may find here the PDF with the given presentation slides.

Many students from the local vocational school on information technology, telecommunications and electrotechnical engineering attended the presentation, together with some other people interested on the “Open Hardware” approach that we adopted. Many interesting questions rise from the students, and given the young age of the guys, nobody seems to ever heard about the “Power” architecture.

The audience -mostly young students- attending the presentation.

The complete lack of knowledge about alternatives, led to a discussion that shifted towards the importance of supporting non-mainstream technologies other that x86/x64 and ARM. The “Open Hardware” approach, and the freedom to its outcome also seems to have drawn much attention, as for a student it is very clear that freely study and, why not, change an existing fully fledged project is an ideal situation.

Linux Day: Bolzano – Italy

The experience at the LinuxDay in Bolzano (Italy) was quite good.

https://www.lugbz.org/events/linux-day-2018/

There were about 50 people attending the event, organized from the local Linux User Group and hosted at the local University. We had a 25 minutes time slot, our presentation was therefore quite short but got some Q&A from the attenders. Most of the audience didn’t have a technical background being just FOSS fans.

LinuxDay 2018 Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Main question subject was the actuality of the PPC technology and its openness. The project timetable and the financial approach also rised some attention.

Linux Day: Milano – Italy

It’s the fifth time that Linux Day Milan give us the possibility to inform and update peoples about our PowerPC Notebook project, we are very grateful for the space and renewed trust they have given us in the years. These year the organizer was the UnixMIB , very active and kindly user group, the event done on 27th OCtober, during the national day of Linux in Italy, was held inside the beautiful spaces of University Bicocca. We had our exhibition space, like some others Linux User Group, where Riccardo, Luigi and myself had the opportunity to talk with attenders of the events.

Linux Day 2018 Milano University Bicocca

During the presentation in the auditorium we have updated about our project and thanks to the generous time available for our presentation (60 minutes) we have the opportunity to answer in details to many interesting questions.

Presentation at Linux Day 2018 Milano

As usual we have recorded the presentation, below.

11th GNU/Linux Valencia meeting.

Software libre, democracia y nuevos dispositivos: Valencia – Spain

The experience at the 11th GNU/Linux Valencia meeting was very good. There were only 15 people attending the event in a nice small room because this was not a yearly event but a monthly meetup. After an interesting explanation about Free Software and Democracy, we had a 20 minutes time slot to introduce our project but our presentation was interesting for the attenders and then we were answering questions for another 20-25 minutes.

Presention at 11th GNU/Linux Valencia meeting. Software libre, democracia y nuevos dispositivos: Valencia – Spain

Coming Soon Presentations

Free Software Conference

At Sfscon.it – Free Software Conference – our new presentation ” Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook disclose the motherboard design“, Bozen, South Tyrol – Italy 16th November

Revivo Scratch project

Revivo con Scratch

The project is targeted at the education and research field, through the reuse of obsolete notebooks

equipped with PowerPC (G3,G4,G5), Intel x86 (Pentium M, Celeron, Core duo) or ARM architecture.

Schools that do not have enough hardware to carry out computer projects, can reuse these notebooks, otherwise intended to be disposed of as WEEE on which they can teach children the basics of coding through SCRATCH (https://scratch.mit.edu/).

Revivo con Scratch

The experiences of the teachers involved in the project will be summarized on the wiki of the Association to be shared and repeated.

Repo.powerprogress.org update

Debian ppc64

Maintenance of DEBIAN packages for ppc64 architecture continues. We are working on optimizing the experience of using FireFox 52.9.0, merging the work already done on the TenFourFox project. Other essential packages are maintained by our collaborators and are regularly added to our repository. Suggest some packages that you would like to see in our repository, and provide the results of your tests.

OSHW PowerPC Notebook project presentations around Europe

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Guillermo Amat

During the last week of October we were presenting our Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook project in the Linux Day Italy and Amiga32 in Germany. After that, we also introduced our Open Hardware project in Alchimie12 in France.

Since 2001, Linux Day is a distributed initiative to learn and promote Linux and free software.

This year the main topic of the Linux Day was “privacy and individual confidentiality”.

The event consists of numerous local events, organized independently by groups of fans in their respective cities, all on the same day. In this context, you can find talks, workshops, technical assistance, gadgets, forums and practical demonstrations.

Linux Day 2017 Milano PowerPC Notebook Labs presentation

Our project was shown in Milano by Roberto I. and in Bolzano by Diego M. (see picture below)

Above you can see Roberto explaining the work carried out by some of our members in what we call “Labs”.

Continue reading →

The fundraising of the PowerPC Notebook reaches a 20% of its goal in six days

Posted on June 29, 2017 by Guillermo Amat

The fundraising of the PowerPc Notebook has reached a 20% of its goal in six days. This is a good starting point but we need you to spread our project to achieve our target.

Remember this campaign is trying to lead to a fully open source hardware. Releasing a complete laptop product as Open Source is an important step that people will forward across the globe. So this project is important to spread the open source philosophy. Do not miss this opportunity. Donate now!.

In another vein, we are tracking the campaign and following what people says in social networks. Some of you have expressed some concerns because there is no refund if the campaign fails. As we have explained in the FAQ of the campaign page, if we cannot reach the sum of 12600€ we will use the money to fund a similar project in the scope of the association (Power Progress Community) mission. As is stated in the statutes (ART 3):

“The Association promotes and disseminates software (especially open source software), and open hardware (with focus on, but not limited to, PowerPC and OpenPower architectures) with the aim of sharing knowledge and expertise.”

There are also discussions about the final specs of the machine. We cannot give all the details because is the objective of this stage to determine what components to include. So what we can do right now is to clarify that we want to have an MXM connector for the graphic card but we cannot guarantee that it will be finally included.

We are in the good way! Just remember that everything will start after we reach the 12600€ goal and we are very close to that. Do not hesitate to contact us to ask or comment whatever.

The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

Posted on June 23, 2017 by Guillermo Amat

We are very happy to announce that our funding campaign has just started. Starting today, we will accept donations through our campaign page with the objective of collecting funds to establish a contract with Acube Systems to design the PowerPC Notebook motherboard.

It has been a long way and we feel we are only starting. We wanted to reach this point many months ago but we found some difficulties and we tried to find solutions for all of them. In this time we have created our non profit association (Power Progress Community), we started a preliminary task for selecting hardware components, we have identified people to maintain a Linux distribution, we contacted companies and organizations and of course, we received you support in our website, in our facebook page, in the forum and other social networks.

The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

After all this work and solving all these issues we are ready to collect the money required to start the engineering process. In the end, it is not the intention of this blog entry to explain all the details here so, we invite you to find all the information in the campaign page: https://fundraising.powerpc-notebook.org/

Thank you very much for your support and enthusiasm.

Let’s Spread GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook Project

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Roberto Innocenti

Saturday 14th March I have presented to everybody our GNU/Linux PowerPC notebook project at “Fa’ la cosa giusta!” – The national fair of conscious consumption and sustainable lifestyles (Italy) 12th edition, Milan, 13-14-15 March 2015 – more info about “Fa’ la cosa giusta!”

Fa' La Cosa Giusta - GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook presentation

“Fa’ La Cosa Giusta!” The national fair of conscious consumption – Stand “Informatica Solidale”

I was there trying to recruit volunteers for the PowerPC Notebook project; inform the wider Computer and FOSS community about the projects existence.

When I was arrived at our little stand there was people in the morning that already have searched me about our project ( I have informed some others “solidarity based purchasing group” about that and even thanks to my blog deliriotecnologico ). There was already one person that waiting me at the stand.

I have stopped many people walking around the fair of conscious consumption asking them: “Do you use free sotware?Do you Linux? Do you use Ubuntu?” if they answer me that that use or want to use it I have started talking about our project.

I have invited people to subscribe to our newsletter and collaborate with us, I have found many interested people, and eleven of them have signed directly the subscription to our project. Over that with the friends of “Joomla Lombardia” and “Informatica Solidale” association we are agreed to continue to collaborate together in relation to spread our project. I’m very happy and grateful about the people feedback, interest and collaboration, and I know if I had been more days at the fair definitely other people that just added to the project, so there are many more people interest than our possibility to arrive to them 😀

In the fair there was even a space of Green Makers with many fablabs and tech projects, I have talked with some makers to present our projects inside fablabs or other tech space, and with some of them we are agree to present soon our “GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook project” and its technological solidarity based purchasing group.

I propose to organize everywhere initiatives to publicize the project that we are building a solidarity based purchasing group to pay an innovative manufacturer and designer (through some commission) to build a GNU/Linux PowerPC notebook, so let’s Spread GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook Project. Continue reading →

GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook at “Fa’ la cosa giusta!” fair of conscious consumption

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Roberto Innocenti

This saturday 14th March I will present to everybody our GNU/Linux PowerPC notebook project at “Fa’ la cosa giusta!” – The national fair of conscious consumption and sustainable lifestyles (Italy) 12th edition, Milan, 13-14-15 March 2015 – more info about “Fa’ la cosa giusta!”

Fa La Cosa Giusta – The national fair of conscious consumption and sustainable lifestyles

I will be in the “padiglione 4” of Fieramilanocity, Peace and Partecipation, stand PP06 inside the stand of “computer solidarity” (Informatica Solidale) association.

I will be there trying to recruit volunteers for the PowerPC Notebook project; inform the wider Computer and FOSS community about the projects existence, I will provide updated information about how my endeavors go and I hope this time I will take more photos

We have opened a new board, Public physical Presentation , on the forum where everyone can share information about events where the GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook project makes an appearance or is mentioned. Continue reading →