[ale] Canonical discontinues Itanium and SPARC support in Ubuntu

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 10:00 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> kind of sad, yet not really. Both chips are dead except for really
> esoteric things (SPARC still used in a game box?). RedHat dropped it
> with Fedora at F13. RHEL 6 will not support either as well (I think).
> 
> The really sad part is the number of system still out there that are
> now destined for the trash heap because of no more software support.
> SGI sold a small crapton of Itanium gear designed for Linux. The code
> is still in the kernel so it will be around for a while longer. 

Well, at least it's possible to maintain stuff by oneself, or "port"
things like Debian and Ubuntu to such platforms unofficially and try to
keep them up-to-date.  If I had any need to use either or these two
architectures, I'd probably set up a local repository and try to keep it
up.  And I would probably need to get a second Internet connection just
to host it for others... I think that'd be less expensive than having a
box or three sitting in a data center somewhere and worrying about how
much bandwidth has been used.

However, I can't say that I have any motivation to do it, nor even the
ability to test it all.  I've only run Linux on PowerPC, IA-32, and
x86-64 in the past 5 years or so (not counting my phone, of course,
which is an ARM architecture).

	--- Mike