Ready to switch to first Open Hardware GNU/Linux PowerPC notebook & desktop

It's the right time to be protagonist and active to put together the first Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook & Desktop designed around GNU/Linux

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OSHW PowerPC Notebook Chassi + Motherboard

HowTo

Libre Hardware and Software are bricks of our societies and should be in our hands! We as community we have conceived, designed and realized the OSHW PowerPC Notebook motherboard prototypes. Now for getting the core computing platform stable and functional we need your participation.

Group Synergy

Open Hardware Community Driven. Improving and enriching human relations and collaboration among us permit our Community the conceive, design and produce prototypes of our Open Hardware motherboard. What we do is governed and possibile by our Community. New projects will be launched thanks to the arrival of new volunteers like you.

DIY Maker Mindset

We collaborate with volunteers to create the opportunity to experience hands-on learning, to inspire creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving trying to conceive, design and produce what we need or desire. We encourage this culture from primary schools to University and with no age limit.

Open Hardware Community Driven

Our open hardware projects are governed by our Community that is open. Our Community conceive, design and produce and where needed, thanks to donations, we pay engineers. We are quite slow because we solve problems thank to our passion, creativity and obstinacy.

Democratize Electronic design and production

We seek to encourage communities to acquire the skills and capabilities necessary to produce hardware and software independently and to have control over it. Therefore, we promote local and decentralized design and production.

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

Debian 9 and PowerPC

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Guillermo Amat

As you probably know, the PowerPC Notebook team had already selected Debian 9 (Stretch) OS, as it seemed to offer a lot of advantages (DFSG, Altivec, compatibility etc…). Because of this, the Debian team has recently decided to remove powerpc (Big Endian) from its release architectures for the upcoming Debian 9 (Stretch) and Debian testing (Stretch) powerpc repositories have been removed. Besides that, they will keep ppc64el (Little Endian) as a release architecture (For those of you who don’t know the difference between powerpc, ppc64el (and ppc64) – check the short summary on the end of this message).

Debian 9 is coming

One of the reasons of this decision was an apparent lack of porters/maintainers/testers – Although the powerpc Debian team includes some very competent, motivated and reactive people.

Some of us are willing to take the Debian powerpc road, but we need volunteers, people willing to give some of their time to the Debian powerpc community, to learn, test, fix bugs etc…

This does not suggest we don’t keep a “plan B” – by testing another distribution. It is just that Debian powerpc works well on current 32 bits and 64 bits machines, and we can try to keep this situation.

If you have a 32 or 64 bits PowerPC machine, and want to join us in keeping Debian powerpc alive, contact us on team@powerprogress.org.

Short summary about powerpc / ppc64 / ppc64el :

powerpc is the historical Debian PowerPC port (1997). It works on 32 and 64 bits Big Endian PowerPC (G3/G4/G5 and newer freescale/NXP chips). That’s what you would use on your PowerMac/PowerBook/Genesi/Amiga machines. Note that is supports Altivec, which accelerates greatly some applications (video, graphics, image processing).
ppc64 (Big Endian) was supposed to be used on 64 bits Big Endian PowerPC only (G5 and newer freescale/NXP chips). It has some advantages over the first but currently is not so well supported as powerpc.
ppc64el (Little Endian) started with Debian 8 Jessie. It works on newer Power chips from IBM (for servers). Despite some newer freescale/NXP chips can also be used in Little Endian mode (but without Altivec) they can not be used with ppc64el as this version is compiled with VSX (Vector Scalar eXtension) enabled.

About Open Source Hardware

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Guillermo Amat

At the end of this past year we started to consider the possibility of making our motherboard Open Source Hardware (OSH). After discussing the idea with the hardware producer, both sides agreed that this was a good idea. We announced this new challenge at the beginning of the year and now we think is the perfect time to clarify the implications of making the motherboard Open Source Hardware. To explain it better, we are going to formulate and respond to a couple of questions.

What is open source hardware?

It seems difficult to explain what is OSH. A complete and detailed explanation can be found on the OSHWA definition page, but simplifying it even further, we can say that OSH is hardware made in such a way that its design is publicly available. Not only that, the documentation provided to understand and reproduce the device should be friendly, in terms of allowing its edition and improvements. So a PDF file containing the schematics is not enough to describe a hardware device as open source hardware. To open source a hardware project, the complete set of CAD and description files should be provided, enabling for instance the edition of the circuits. Of course if any firmware is used to make the hardware work it should be also available as open source code.

The problem for a project like ours is attempting to reach a complete degree of openness. A notebook uses many components which are created by third party companies and, as can be imagined, nearly all of them are under proprietary licenses. In many cases, if you want to use them you have to sign an NDA agreement with their maker (for instance, NXP for a PPC processor). Furthermore, the signature of an NDA means that you can not reveal particular pieces of information in relation to that item.

The OSHWA also refers to this particular problem when explaining the process of awarding a certificate to hardware for achieving the satus of being Open Source Hardware:

“However, that does not necessarily mean that the entire project must or will be open source. If the creators used third party closed components outside of their control, they are unable – and are therefore not required – to open source those components. While it is strongly prefered to use open components when possible, OSHWA recognizes the reality that this is not always possible”

So, what’s our plan?

We want to be as open as possible. We will publish all the CAD files, specifications and any other documentation in a way that could be usable. Of course we will share our source code too (firmware and drivers). On the other hand, we will not be able to make public any third party resources covered by an NDA.

One more thing we will do is give preference to any component that could be considered open source if it accomplishes what we need. However, we need to be practical too, so the selection could be a different component if the open source hardware component lacks desired features.

Finally, where are we in in this process?

As we announced a couple of weeks ago, we have constituted the Power Progress Community association this past summer and the members of the project are currently in the process of joining the assocation by completing our membership application and paying the yearly membership fee (30 Euro). WIth that, Roberto is currently presiding over the association and soon we will have the first NDA agreements signed.

Power Progress Community logo

Another important point to quickly cover is the list of hardware components for the PPC notebook. The selection of these components is not quite completed yet, but we now feel this aspect of the project is most important so it is currently our main focus. Once the list of hardware components is finalized we will release this information in another project update. Look for that in the very near future.

The Power Progress Community is here

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Guillermo Amat

We are proud to announce that our association has been constituted. As you might know, it is an Italian organization so the original statutes are written in Italian and we are working to have an English translation. The contents of that document were discussed at the beginning of July, the conversations were very productive and after some modifications we had the statutes ready for the creation of the association. Moreover, in that meeting we approved its name and now we are setting up a new Internet domain according to that. After agreeing all this, the association was finally registered at the end of July.

Power Progress Community

This fact is very important for us because it allows us to contact other organizations and companies as a real entity and gives us the possibility of signing agreements of any type. Even more, the association is the legal figure we need to start the funding campaign.

And now… we need a logo

We are organizing a contest during August to select the Power Progress Community logo. Everybody is invited to send us an image but we are deciding how to receive them and the voting application to use. Stay tuned to this website if you are interested on participating.

More activities of interest

Continuing with this update, we were doing a survey to check how the community wants to support the project. Over 150 people filled our survey and most of them show interest in funding the project somehow. In addition, there is a group of people which will contribute only if the final specs of the notebook match their expectations. Lastly, a very small group showed only curiosity with no intention of collaborating with money.

Some weeks ago we wrote a post explaining our first Hardware Group meeting. The good news here is that this group is being very active these days and we arranged a new meeting last week focusing on what components could be more open and accomplish our requirements. In relation to this, we are maintaining conversations with two companies that could provide us the enclosures. This is a key point because determines how the motherboard is designed.

That’s almost all, we are moving forward and the crowdfunding campaign is near.

Hardware meeting report

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Guillermo Amat

On June 13th, we had our first hardware meeting about the components selection with the hardware producer. There are still a lot of pending points but the discussion was quite positive as a first approach.

Our team during the hardware meeting 🙂

There were some agreements in terms of what technologies to use, to discard or even the ones that needed to be followed and investigated further.

We were discussing about the use of a southbrige chip, like the AMD one or some other different chips to manage USB3, USB2, SATA2/3, or even U.2

To make it clear, we are are trying to select chips that permit us to design an Open Hardware motherboard (chips having an NDA that limit less this idea). Moreover, we want components that are well supported by GNU/Linux and other OSs.

After the conversation, we agreed the next tasks to achieve which are the following: