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The Linux User Group HOWTO is intended to serve as a guide to founding,
maintaining, and growing a GNU/Linux user group.
GNU/Linux is a freely-distributable implementation of Unix for personal
computers, servers, workstations, PDAs, and embedded systems. It was
developed on the i386 and now supports a huge range of processors from
tiny to colossal:
- Diverse
PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
- Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd.
ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM7TDMI, ARM720T, and ARM920T, including Sigma Designs DVD systems using ARM cores)
- Analog Devices, Inc.'s
Blackfin DSP
- Axis Communications
ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
- Elan SC520 and SC300
- FreeScale
MC68EN302
- Fujitsu
FR-V
- Hitachi
H8 series
- Intel i960
- Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics
STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
- Matsushita
AM3x
- MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba
TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC
VR series,
Realtek 8181)
- Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards,
ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola
Dragonball &
ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
- Motorola embedded
PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
- NEC
V850E
- Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH:
link1
link2)
- Samsung
CalmRISC
- Texas Instruments's
DM64x and
C54x DSP families
- Xilinx
SoftBlaze (aka Microblaze) soft processor implemented on Xilinx FPGAs
- Intel
8086 / 80286.
- Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro,
Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors,
as well as IA32 clones from AMD (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX,
486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Elan, K5,
K6/K6-II/K6-III), Cyrix (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX,
486DLC/DLC2/DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Cyrix III),
IDT (Winchip, Winchip 2, Winchip 2A/3),
IBM (486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2),
NexGen (Nx586), Transmeta (Crusoe),
TI (486DLC/DLC2), UMC (486SX-S, U5D/U5S),
VIA (C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", C3-2 "Nehemiah"),
and others.
- Intel/HP
IA64: Trillian, Itanium, Itanium2/McKinley
- x86-64
x86-64 family
including AMD Hammer/Opteron/K8/Athlon64 and Intel
Prescott/Nocona/Potomac
- Motorola
68020-68040 series (with MMU):
m68k Mac,
Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain,
HP9000/300,
sun3, and
Sinclair Q40.
- Motorola/IBM
PowerPC family: Most
PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) /
CHRP /
PReP /
POP,
Amiga PowerUP System,
and IBM
PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000, iSeries,
pSeries, PowerMac G5).
-
MIPS:
most SGI, Cobalt Qube,
DECStation,
Sony
PlayStation2, and many others
- DEC
Alpha
- HP
PA-RISC
- SPARC International
SPARC32 / SPARC64
- Digital
VAX minicomputers and MicroVAXen
- Mainframes:
IBM S/390 models G5 and G6 / zSeries models z800, z890, z900, and z990 and
Fujitsu AP1000+ (SuperSPARC cluster)
Note that some items listed were probably one-time forks, little or not
at all maintained since creation. On some of the rarer architectures,
NetBSD may be more practical.
(Soon, the
Debian GNU/NetBSD and
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ports should be solid enough to
serve as a compromise option, furnishing GNU/Linux userspace code on the
highly portable NetBSD kernel and the high performance / high stability
FreeBSD kernel, respectively.)
If seriously interested in the subject of Linux ports, please see also
Xose Vazquez Perez's Linux ports page and
Jerome Pinot's Linux architectures list (static mirrors, as both pages vanished in 2005), if only because
hardware support is more complex than just generic CPU functionality,
encompassing support for myriad bus variations and other subtle hardware
issues (especially for
Linux PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router ports).
The above list aims mostly to generally illustrate the breadth of
Linux's reach.
If you want to learn more, the
Linux Documentation Project is a good place to start.
For general information about computer user groups, please see the
Association of PC Users Groups.
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