Expanding gaming library, Fosdem 21 and more

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Saulo Paiva

Progress on the software front

It is a well-known fact that a strong software library is a key factor to the viability of any platform – as could attest any unwilling user of a specific operating system 😉.

Our team is aware of that. Our contributors are strongly focused on compiling and optimizing a broad array of games and productivity applications to the PPC64 Big Endian platform, and you will find all of it in our repo.

Super Mario 64

The timeless sm64 is making its way to our portfolio, delivering countless hours of challenging courses and brilliant colors in a package loved by children and adults alike. Jump around, fly, dive, explore dungeons, lakes, mountains and collect coins and stars to make it to the top.

Super Tux Kart

Super Tux Kart is inspired by the most popular arcade racer in the world. It will keep you busy while you master every turn and try to overtake your opponents. As the developers of the Mascot Kingdom say: “In Story mode, you must face the evil Nolok, and defeat him in order to make the Mascot Kingdom safe once again! You can race by yourself against the computer, compete in several Grand Prix cups, or try to beat your fastest time in Time Trial mode. You can also race or battle with up to eight friends on a single computer, play on a local network or play online with other players all over the world.”

H-Craft Championship

H-Craft Championship is a sci-fi racer with more than 28 tracks and unique driving physics. Get the Championship trophy or push your limits with two time attack modes. You will also enjoy a good time with your family and friends with 4 players sharing the same PC.

Unfortunately, we’ve had to halt work on porting the Unreal Engine. It is a huge task and we’ve faced roadblocks. We are planning to resume the task once we’ve completed the MRs of our port to the mainline of Freedesktop-SDK, required to compile flatpak packages on PPC64 Big Endian.

FreeCAD

When it’s business time, beyond the usual Linux productivity suites, we are also offering a PPC64 Big Endian optimised version of FreeCAD, so you can make come true your next breakthrough using the best laptop in the world. FreeCAD is a modeller for CAD, MCAD, CAx, CAE and PLM fitting a broad range of uses in engineering and architecture, and runs the same way in all major platforms, ensuring the full portability of your work.

If you don’t believe source code, I am sure you will believe your own eyes. Visit our YouTube channel and enjoy a bit of PowerPC glory! We are online at (link to youtube)

Exciting, right?

If you have the chance and skills to help, our warm and friendly community invites you to leave your mark on the future of open computing with your contribution and, as a bonus, you will become a better and more versatile developer. Why?

We live in an increasingly little endian world. With the near-monopoly of x86/amd64 in the desktop/laptop/server computing world, the culture of writing portable and performant multi-platform software has declined. We favour a multicultural world. An environment where multiple platforms have an opportunity to thrive gives us new perspectives to solve computing problems, instead of relying only on the old and tried, leading to a world of opener, safer and better software overall.

When developer to our platform, you must keep in mind that you are targeting a Big Endian platform. Manual endianness swapping must be avoided. If you are careful enough, you may be able to extract a bit of performance here and there, but you always must maintain specific use cases and ensure proper architecture detection throughout your code, otherwise the code won’t be architecture-independent.

With automatic swapping, the code is easier to maintain and port. POSIX offers tools for automatic endianness conversion. For more details, please check our guidelines.

Our talk at the FOSDEM 21

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. In 2021, the gathering will be online. Be part of the best FOSS conference in Europe – it is for free and registration is required.

We will, of course, mark our presence, with our own Roberto Innocenti hosting a talk and showcasing that now it is the time to switch to Open Hardware and raise again the profile of the Power Architecture.

Roberto’s presentation will happen on Saturday, 6th of February, 2021, starting at 12:15 CET and ending at 13:00. We will be seeing you there!

Progetto degli schemi elettrici: Febbraio 2019

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Luigi Vigani

Gli schemi elettrici sono ancora in fase revisione da parte dei nostri volontari che si occupano dell’hardware e da parte della stessa Acube. Speriamo di pubblicare la prima versione di schema entro la fine di febbraio nel nostro repository gitlab. Trattandosi di work in progress pubblicheremo solo il pdf. Pubblicheremo il file OrCad quando lo schema elettrico sarà completato. Contemporaneamente cominceremo la campagna di donazioni per il disegno del PCB.

Pensiamo di iniziare la raccolta fondi prima della fine di febbraio 2019.

È possibile trovare maggiori informazioni sui componenti nello schema elettrico pubblicato nel precedente post

SFSCon Bolzano: Novembre 2019

Il 16 novembre 2018 alla SFSCon (Free Software Conference) di Bolzano abbiamo presentato il nostro progetto nella sala grande alla presenza di circa cento persone, benché fosse tardi ed eravamo i penultimi.

Abbiamo parlato dei passi fatti dal nostro progetto di Notebook basato su Open Hardware PowerPc GNU/Linux. Abbiamo mostrato una preview dello schema elettrico e dato informazioni sui prossimi passi. È stato un onore presentare il nostro progetto vicino a importanti speaker e appena prima di Simon Phipps, il Presidente della Open Source Initiative (OSI). Siamo molto grati a IDM Südtirol e al Linux User Group di Bolzano (organizzatori della Free Software Conference?) per l’opportunità che ci hanno dato. Potete trovare il programma della SFSCon a questo link.

SFScon18 – Free Software Conference 2018

Stand al Paris Open Source Summit (POSS) – Francia – Dicembre 2018

La Power Progress Community è stata rappresentata per la prima volta all’Open Source Summit che si è tenuto dal 5 al 6 dicembre 2018 nelle vicinanze della capitale francese.

L’annuale evento Open Source Summit è focalizzato sulla promozione di free e open source software nella regione di Parigi, riunendo sia le varie realtà associative che le aziende.

Per la nostra prima presenza abbiamo incontrato molti visitatori interessati alla nostra inziativa.

Siamo grati al team Parinux.org e Franciliens.net per averci permesso di partecipare a POOS – Open Source Summit.

POSS 2018 – Eduard that inform about our PowerPC Notebook project

Open Source Laptop – progetto dello chassis

Grazie ad alcuni collaboratori è stato impostato il progetto per un futuro chassis per laptop Open Source realizzato con FreeCad. Puoi trovare il progetto nel nostro repository.

Per maggiori informazioni puoi consultare il sito dedicato.

Se vuoi collaborare al progetto dell’Open Source Laptop chassis per favore contattaci.

Compilazione nel Minicloud

Vogliamo ringraziare l’Università di Campinas in Brasile per il supporto e l’eccellente servizio (che si chiama Minicloud) che stanno offrendo. Minicloud fornisce accesso libero a delle istanze POWER che possono essere usate per lo sviluppo, test e migrazione di applicazioni. Le macchine virtuali di Minicloud girano su OpenStack, che supporta il funzionamento di un grande numero di macchine virtuali su un singolo server Linux scalabile. Stiamo usando la loro infrastruttura per compilare la nostra distribuzione basata su Yocto. Al momento stiamo aggiornando tutto il progetto a Yocto 2.6 e questo lavoro viene eseguito in una Minicloud VM. Se hai un progetto che segue le regole di base spiegate in precedenza puoi chiedere un account qui a questo link: https://minicloud.parqtec.unicamp.br/minicloud/

January Post Update PCB Campaign

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Communications Team

Schematics design: February 2019

The schematics are still under review by our hardware volunteers and Acube itself, we hope to publish the initial schematic design before the end of February 2019 in our gitlab repository. It will be a Work-In-Progress schematic design. As the schematic design is a Work-In-Progress we will only publish the pdf. We will publish the Orcad files when the schematic design will be finalized. In parallel to the schematic design being released to the public, we will begin the PCB Layout Donation Campaign.

The schematics will be updated later including all laptop external connectors actually present on the laptop chassis, due to the selection of the chassis to use is still pending.

We plan to begin the PCB Layout Donation Campaign before the end of February 2019.

You can find more information related to the chip components inside the schematic design you can find in the previous post

Sfscon Bolzano – Italy – November 2018

At 16th November 2018 at Sfscon.it we have made our project presentation speech in the bigger room with the presence of around one hundred people ( even though it was late and it was the penultimate) .

We have talked about the steps done by us for our project of Open Hardware PowerPC GNU/Linux based Notebook. We have disclosed a preview of our electrical schematics and informed about the next steps.It was for us an honour to present our project near important speakers and just before Simon Phipps which is the President at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). We thanks so much IDM Südtirol and Linux User Group Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan of the Free Software Conference Bozen, South Tyrol, that are the organizers for such an opportunity. You can find the program of the Sfscon 2018 at this link.

Stand at Paris Open Source Summit (POSS) – France – December 2018

Power Progess Community was represented for the first time at the Open Source Summit held from December 5 to 6, 2018 in the vicinity of the French capital

The annual Open Source Summit event focuses on the promotion of free and open source softwares in the Paris region, bringing together both the various associative communities and companies.
We had for a first presence many visitors interested in our initiative.

We’d like to thank the team at Parinux.org and Franciliens.net to allow us to participate to the POSS event. Open Source Summit – Paris – December 2018

Open Source Laptop Chassis Design

Thanks to some collaborators there is a first setup of the design of a future Open Source laptop chassis design, done in FreeCad. You can find the design in our repo.

If you like to collaborate to the Open Source Laptop chassis design please contact us.

For more information you can check in the dedicated site

Building in the Minicloud

We want to thank the University of Campinas in Brazil for their support and for the excellent service (called Minicloud) they are offering. The Minicloud provides free access to POWER virtual machines that can be used for development, testing or migration of applications to POWER. The virtual machines of Minicloud run on OpenStack, which supports running a large number of virtual machines on a single scale-out Linux server. We are using their infrastructure to build our Yocto based distribution. Currently we are upgrading all the project to Yocto 2.6 and this task is being performed in a Minicloud VM. If you have a project which follows the basic rules explained before, you can ask for an account here https://minicloud.parqtec.unicamp.br/minicloud/ .