OT: Linux apps on x86 vs. PPC

[Frank Koormann]

Hi all,
 
* Douglas Hathaway (dougkh at u.washington.edu) [000511 23:22]:
>       A couple of weeks ago, a listmember said he couldn't get GRASS
> running on PPCLinux, and asked whether anyone had gotten it to run on
> any
> Mac *nix port. I haven't tried yet, but I found an article yesterday
> that
> may shed some light on where incompatibility can occur when users
> attempt
> to run apps developed for x86 Linux on PPC's. At least, I didn't know
> this
> before:
>
> "Can I Run Linux or Unix on My Mac?"
> http://www.holymac.com/news/canirunlinunix.shtml
>
 
I read the article and I must say the author has not done the analysis
very serious. "... I imagine that KDE and GNOME/GTK are available for
PowerPC ..." sounds to me as if he never installed a PPC specific linux
distribution. YellowDog, PPCLinux, SuSEPPC and the others (sorry for not
mentioning :) come with both desktop models and with a collection of
X-Servers.
 
The bit order can be a problem and you can't run a i386-compiled
binary on a ppc, but most applications are implemented "endian-aware"
and can be recompiled from the sources. So does GRASS: I have a
running PPCLinux (2000) on a G3 PowerBook (Lombard) and for the
FreeGIS Project we compiled GRASS 5beta6 successfully (after a minor
bugfix).
 
It can be found under
ftp://intevation.de/freegis/gnu-linux-ppc/updates/
GRASS-5.0beta6-2.ppc.rpm
GRASS-5.0beta6-2.src.rpm
 
Regards,
 
        Frank
 
--
Frank Koormann                              http://intevation.net/~frank/
 Professional Service around Free Software         http://intevation.net/
 FreeGIS Project                                   http://freegis.org/