Hi Everyone,

HP has generously given us a very nice dual-CPU Itanium 2 system with
10GB of RAM on extended loan to allow us to port Gentoo Linux to it. I
currently have it set up on my LAN and can give out access to
experienced Gentoo developers and possibly some non-developers who might
have already begun work on porting Gentoo to IA64.

There are several people on the Gentoo dev team who are very motivated
to get our IA64 rock-solid as soon as we possibly can, so I'd expect our
progress on IA64 to move along very very quickly. If you have the time
and experience to help in some capacity, please email Seemant Kulleen at
seemant@gentoo.org and cc me (drobbins@gentoo.org) and tell us how you
can help.

The machine is currently running Debian. Porting plan is:

1) port Portage to Debian/IA64
2) use Portage to build an IA64 stage1 in a chroot
3) use Portage to build an IA64 stage3 in a chroot
4) get it to boot
5) convert system over to native Gentoo operation
6) expand support for IA64 throughout the Portage tree
7) release

Best Regards,

Daniel