Interacting with the Community
The Linux community is open for anyone to get involved. The PowerPC
community, being smaller, often has more need for people to help out
even for smaller, easily-accomplished tasks.
Mailing lists are the ideal place to find answers and help others
with their own questions. You don't need to subscribe in order to
post, but it's a good idea. The PowerPC Linux development mailing lists
are hosted at ozlabs.org. There are two
important rules for getting the help you want and not annoying people
in the process: Search the list archives first — your
question may have already been answered. Make sure you post your
question to the right list — if you're having trouble
installing a distribution and you post your question to the
linuxppc-dev list, you won't get any help but you will get annoyed
emails.
Mailing lists reach the widest audience, but for interactive discussion
IRC is the answer. There is a variety of graphical or text-based IRC
clients, including xchat and irssi. You can get some introductory help
on the web from sites like irchelp.org. If you ask a question and
nobody answers, be patient. Many people are gone or working on
other things. Wait patiently and resist the urge to repeat the same
question over and over again.
Relevant channels on freenode include #mklinux and #ppc64 (development conversation only please), #ppclinux, #yellowdog, #debianppc, #gentoo-ppc, and #crux.
Relevant channels on freenode include #mklinux and #ppc64 (development conversation only please), #ppclinux, #yellowdog, #debianppc, #gentoo-ppc, and #crux.
- Join IRC channels and mailing lists and help answer questions! You'll learn a lot too, just by reading the ongoing discussions.
- Favorite software project? You don't need to be a developer:
- help create PPC packages for it
- test often, and tell the developers or open bug reports when they accidentally break PPC
- just reminding developers that they have PPC users will encourage them to think about portability
- if the PPC packages require special steps to install, contribute to the installation guide
- for software like device drivers, contribute to the "supported hardware" list and make sure PPC is listed
- help other PPC users on the project's mailing lists and forums. The more noise we make, the more popular we seem. :)
- Web developer? Author? You can help us with this website, for example by contributing an article about PPC-specific software (e.g. pmud).
Last modified: 22 January 2006