IBM

Picked up a couple JS20 blades the other day, then found that I only had AIX 5.1 (and 5.2 was the first version to support JS20). So I'm in search of a modern-ish Linux to run on them since, unlike with old IRIX versions, old Linux versions are pretty boring! Most of the links I've found so far are either broken or so dated that they hardly seem worth investigating -- lots of references to RHEL4, SuSE 8/9, etc.

One thing I'm not sure about is what are the practical differences between PowerPC 970 and G5 (if any), esp. in terms of distro hardware support? Should I be looking for some type of kernel in particular?

A lot of broken links on:
http://www.readmespot.com/question/f/96 ... rpc-blade-

I'm downloading the Ubuntu 10.04 CD now from:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/lucid/release/

And Arch Linux PPC looks promising:
http://www.archlinuxppc.org/

Any thoughts / advice?

A G5 is a PowerPC 970 that Apple's marketing department got to.

This should be a pretty standard CHRP machine, try throwing any recent CHRP PPC Linux at it. RedHat or SuSE should work, and Debian probably will.

Well, Yellow Dog Linux 6.2 is slightly dated now, but is the only one I've been able to get working so far. It's Red Hat-based, so will be familiar to CentOS 5 users.

Ubuntu Server 10.04 and IBM's own Linux Installation Toolkit v5.0 both panicked during the boot process, and some googling has led me to believe it's a yaboot configuration issue. I'm not sure I have the interest to really look into it at this point, but thought I'd mention it as a consideration for others that may follow after.

Sounds like no one else on here is using JS20s these days? (not really a big surprise -- not too many bladecenter home users, I'd guess.)

altought JS20 it's not supported maybe you could try to boot a CRUX PPC 2.7 (64bit).
Maybe you can use the YDL Powerstation bootkernel.

Have you got the BladeCentre cage and Management Modules too?