penguinppc.org has announced “The First Annual PPC/Linux Community Awards” — a mix of serious and tongue-in cheek winners and losers for 2000 . . .

Best Distribution

1st Place – MkLinux R1

After years of waiting, MkLinux R1 was finally finished with full support for all Nubus machines including SMP. Heralded by all as the greatest revision yet. All 5 remaining MkLinux users plan to upgrade as soon as the first service pack is announced

2nd Place – LinuxPPC 2000 Q3

Older is better! Or it is according to LinuxPPC Inc. who is bestowing a port of Red Hat 6.2 a year after Red Hat 6.2 was released. Released in August of this year, LinuxPPC 2000 Q3 once again sets the standard for installers comprised of an X server, a live filesystem so big it obsoletes low memory machines, and a few perl-gtk scripts. Way to go for the boys in Wisconsin

Honorable Mention – Yellow Dog Gone Home

'Linux for your neighbor and your dog.' Terra Soft gets our honorable mention for putting this dog to sleep.

Note: For the clue deficient, none of these distro's were released resulting in a great irony in them winning awards. Trust us that this drips with comic genius.

1st Place – Linus Torvalds

Some would say that Linus is prudent in accepting patches from our PPC maintainers. Some would say he is highly critical and selective. Others would say that he just plain plain ignores them. Whatever the case, his hesitation gives us time to spell check, grammar check, and do an OpenBSD style code audit
on our patches. Thanks Linus

2nd Place – Alan Cox

For helping us sneak things past Linus. Thanks Alan.

1st Place – Monta Vista

For their line plotter made out of legos controlled by a PPC machine. Yes it is sad, the best new hardware was a homemade lego printer merely _attached_ to a PPC.

2nd Place – Terra Soft

For introducing the 'iDitarod' PPC cluster and proving once and for all that PPC clusters are feasible, cost competitive, and can have silly sounding names.

Pop Boards in a few months
Gigahertz G4s
Apple to Dump PPC
LinuxPPC Inc. going non-profit in the fall
Emmett Plant demands twinkies for LUG appearances
Mandrake releasing PPC version soon
Red Hat releasing PPC version soon
Apple to improve GCC
Kernel 2.4 by May
Kernel 2.4 by the Fall
Kernel 2.4 by Thanksgiving
Third Party G4 SMP upgrade boards

POP design motherboards

Big Momma's House

The amazing cracking G4 Cube. G4 Cubes will become the Lava Lamp of this decade. Just turn it on, and watch it crack as it heats up!

Time to shift gears and acknowledge those whose work benefited the community at large this year. I do not think it necessary to rank people's accomplishments or work, so the following is an unranked list of people who made this year a better year for PPC/Linux.

Most Valuable Players

Klaus Halfman for his HFS+ Utils
Kevin Hendricks for his work on Java and OpenOffice
Tom Rini for Xautocfg4
Troy Bengerdes for his work on Airport, SMP, and clusters
Franz Sirl for working on the toolchain and the input layer
Samuel Rydh for Mac-On-Linux
IBM's PPC/Linux Team
Benjamin Herrenschmidt for SMP, Airport, core99, PCI work
Andy Lowe for a complete Linux Trace Toolkit port
Olaf Hering for kernel Q/A
Paul Mackerras PPC64, IrDA, etc
Cort Dougan PPC64, etc
Takashi Oe for Nubus work
RealNetworks for providing a PPC/Linux RealPlayer
3dfx for loaning a V5 to Ani
ATI for their assistance

Our Greatest Loss

On July 11, Joel Klecker (aka Espy) passed away at 21 years of age. Noone who saw 'Espy' in #mklinux knew that behind that handle was a young man suffering from a form of muscular dystrophy. Most people only knew him as 'the Debian glibc guy' and had no idea of the hardships Joel fought. Though physically impaired, he shared his great mind with others. Joel Klecker (aka Espy) will be missed.

 
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