On May 1, 2004, at 10:00 PM, Kevin Brown wrote:

> Chris Gehlker wrote:
>
>> On May 1, 2004, at 9:06 PM, Kevin Brown wrote:
>>>>> What follows is a message I sent to the Gentoo-ppc mailing list. I 
>>>>> thought I'd post it here in case anyone has experience with the 
>>>>> problem.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm trying to install Gentoo on a Dual G4 and an iBook using the 
>>>>> Minimal LiveCD. The problem is that I can't get a network 
>>>>> connection from the LiveCD. What's got me stumped is that the 
>>>>> right drivers don't appear to be anywhere on the CD. Checking 
>>>>> Yellow Dog, the G4 needs a sungem driver and the iBook needs a 
>>>>> gmac.
>>>>>
>>>>> It hard for me to believe that the LiveCD doesn't support such 
>>>>> common machines. What am I missing?
>>>>
>>>> Here I am answering my own question for the record. It turn out 
>>>> that gmac and sungem are compiled into the appropriate kernels. All 
>>>> I needed to do was dhcpcd. Why they chose to put all the intel 
>>>> drivers where modprobe would expect to find them and compile in the 
>>>> ppc drivers is an open question. I suspect it has something to do 
>>>> with how few ppc drivers there are. The probably want to keep the 
>>>> distributions as similar as possible.
>>>
>>>
>>> Depends on where they got the source for the Intel cards.  I know 
>>> the e1000 drivers come from Intel itself and so might just be 
>>> legalese that makes it simpler and safer to build them as modules 
>>> since modules don't have to be GPL.
>> That's really an interesting point. It explains why they don't just 
>> compile the intel drivers in as they do with the ppc kernels. It 
>> leaves open the question of why they include the Intel drivers at all 
>> on the ppc LiveCD.
>
> Maybe made with the same software as the x86 Live CD with just the 
> target Arch changed for PPC.  Saves them time and effort on overall 
> customization and simplifies the updating for each of the Live CDs if 
> they are all based off the same code.

I bet that's it. They have a single source bundle and just build for 
different targets. Where all the drivers for a target are open source 
they just conditionally compile them in. Where they have to use 
modprobe, they copy the driver regardless of target.

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