First crowdfuding campaign to start in May

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Roberto Innocenti

We are happy to announce that we are finishing all the tasks required to launch our first crowdfunding campaign.

As you might know at this stage we will financing the electrical engineering and schematics of the motherboard. This work will be carried by ACube Systems if the campaign goal is achieved.

The campaign will be hosted in our current website and these days we are closing some requirements for the launch such as the WordPress plugin, text contents, videos and the secure payments integration through Paypal. We expect to have all ready during the second half of May.

Creative Commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/planeta/8047889850

PowerPC Notebook Crowdfunding – electrical schematics

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Roberto Innocenti

The Power Progress Community ( the non profit organization that we have founded in July 2016) will launch a crowdfunding campaign to finance the analysis of the system architecture, components selection and electrical schematics for the PowerPC Notebook.

The decision has been taken after a voting process, inside our core team, celebrated the third week of March. The majority of the members voted to go ahead with the crowd funding as soon as possible.

This phase will be only the first step to achieve the whole design as the progress of selecting all the required components where taking too much time and energy from the project volunteers. If the funding objective is reached, this task will be done by ACube Systems in a timed boxed period.
Further details about this campaign will be published soon.

Power Progress Community cooperation with Acube Systems

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Roberto Innocenti

Power Progress Community publicly reveals its fruitful cooperation with ACube Systems, an Italian company producing its own line of PowerPC based motherboards. Since the beginning of the project, ACube Systems accepted to build our motherboard. We would like to thank the people of ACube for allowing us to pursue a transparent approach towards a purely Open Source Hardware project, aiming to publish and deliver all technical details of the hardware.

Power Progress Community collaboration with Acube Systems

Our cooperation with ACube, in addition to the chance of building the hardware, gave us an experienced and passionate partner free of charge. Because of that, we also want to thank their continuous support and contribution to our project, allowing us to overcome the encountered difficulties.

So far, ACube is the only company we are cooperating with. In the near future, we wish to be able to establish new cooperation relationships with new associations and organizations sharing the same innovating spirit as our Power Progress Community.

Power Progress Community is a non-profit association composed by people contributing on a voluntary basis, and inspired by the Open Source Hardware and Software movement. The mission is not focused on selling products, and the contribution to the “PowerPC Notebook” is an example; here the Power Progress Community is working to establish and consolidate a potential purchasing group big enough to motivate a manufacturer to start the building process. In addition, the Power Progress Community association is supporting a crowdfunding campaign for designing and prototyping the laptop, as well as encouraging the open source developers in supporting the PowerPC platform.

ACube Systems S.r.l., a world-renowned company, was established in January 2007.
The main goal of ACube Systems is to create and promote innovative hardware and software products thanks to an in-house research and development team supported by collaborations with some well-known Italian and international teams.

Power Progress Community cooperation with Acube Systems

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 →

debian ppc64 and Fedora ppc64 for PowerPC Notebook

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Roberto Innocenti

As you can see from the updated about page you now know who are the people which are working on this project. More people are still being contacted right now and soon you will know them.

Fedora ppc64 on PowerPC Notebook

Peter Czanik talked with many people about this project at FOSDEM 2015 as he wrote on the forum and even at DevConf.cz where the Fedora/RHEL PPC team promised to help if needed to make Fedora run on our PowerPC 64 bit Notebook.

Anyone that wants to help with Fedora ppc64 please contact us or subscribe to the newsletter and you will receive the survey “how to take part to the project.”

Debian ppc64 on PowerPC Notebook Continue reading →

New PPC Notebook Forums and a lot of interest

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Roberto Innocenti

Dear Friends of the PPC Notebook,

There has been a lot of interest in this project with more than more than 140 individuals subscribing to be part of this movement to produce a modern PowerPC notebook computer.

Many of you who have subscribed have filled out the questionnaire e-mailed to you, and a sincere thank you for this first contact. We ask that you give us some time to sort through the information sent to us, we will get back to you soon.

Thank you to those who have began the process of translating the website into several languages (i.e. French, German, Italian, Portuguese, English, etc.). This is an important step in the project as it will allow us to reach out to the FOSS community as a whole, as well as bring more credibility to the project.

We have a long road ahead of us before this projects goals are reached, but we are very committed to making a PPC notebook a reality. A huge thank you to those who help make this project work.

New Forum Online!

The GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook forums are online and active. Some of the community have already registered and everyone is invited to join us at http://forum.powerpc-notebook.org

Happy New Year!

2015 is going to be an important year for this project.

“The PowerPC Notebook team”

P.S. – Keep your eyes on the About pages for each localization as they will be updated with the names of those team members who have contributed already.

Presentation slides used at Linux Day 2014

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Roberto Innocenti

In the morning of October 25th I presented our project to the students participating at Milan’s LinuxDay, while during the afternoon I repeated my speech in front of everybody else. The presentation was so popular that there were more people than seats and a few had to stand to attend my speech.

The aim was to explain what PowerPC is and to show how Free Software is not bound to a particular CPU architecture. The slides used during the presentation were written for everybody, even for people who know nothing about PowerPC.
Below two pictures taken during and after the presentation.

Linux Day 2014 Open Source PowerPC notebook presentation

Continue reading →

PowerPC notebook project at Linux Day 2014

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Roberto Innocenti

At LinuxDay in Milan this 25th October I (Roberto Innocenti) will present the project “Open Source Linux PowerPC notebook” and I want to join together passionate peoples that want a new open source PowerPC notebook.
In the presentation I will give some more details about the projects, my interest is to build up a small but vigorous community of enthusiasts.

Here some guide lines of this PowerPC notebook:

Open (community involvement in development)
Upgradeable (MXM video card, RAM, SDD / HDD, etc)
Italian motherboard design (we hope to be produced and assembled in Italy)
Power/powerpc architecture last generation (64-bit advanced AltiVec, multi tread)
For gaming virtualization of Wii / WiiU, ps3, xbox360
Virtualization macosx powerpc
Power/powerpc gnu/linux server virtualization for professionals

PowerPC Notebook welcome back!

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Roberto Innocenti

It’s time to More Choices!

The last powerpc notebook was produced from Apple at the end of 2005 with a powerpc Freescale cpu MPC447A

Freescale roadmap year 2004 thanks to Appleinsider.com

In the august 2004 Freescale was planning a new powerful powerpc 64bit/32bit processor for new Apple powerpc notebooks, and in fact Freescale have continued in its plans, although not exactly as predicted in 2004 ; anyway from 2005 to nowadays Freescale have produced many 64bit/32 bit powerpc multi-core, multi tread processors.

Freescale now produce many type of multi-core, multi-tread ( some with an enhanced AltiVec technology) PowerPC 64bit processors, below the actual models that have 28nm building process and they have in the roadmap 18nm new PowerPC processors before 2016 .There was false rumors about a possible discontinued PowerPC in favor of ARM architecture; Freescale engineers and the linked documents confirm the Freescale invest strongly in PowerPC processors. Continue reading →