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I'm helping a friend refurbish an iMac G5. So far I've got Lubuntu 16.04 LTS running on it, which is great, but I'm wondering if I can do better.

The machine DOES have a 64-bit PowerPC processor, but I can't figure out if it's possible to run the ppc64el (little-endian) on this machine for which there IS more support, and I can't find anything that's not "el".

I'm guessing no, since this is a POWER4 (PPC970) and not a POWER8.

EDIT: Apparently Fedora 25 would work, but I'm not sure if that would gain me anything over 16.04 LTS...

Any thoughts? R

flyingfishfinger
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You're right, a G5 cannot run ppc64le binaries.

You can absolutely run more recent ppc64 big-endian binaries, but Ubuntu won't supply them to you. You'd need to look for another, more specialised distro. These days if I need to build something for ppc64 big-endian I would probably use buildroot, but you might want something more user-friendly like Adélie Linux. There's also a kinda-sorta supported Debian ppc64 big-endian project.

Just be aware that support for ppc64 is going away or has gone away for some projects, like Go or OpenMPI.

dja
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