Does any one know if there is a project similar to wine to get osx program running on linux with out emulation? Or is the problem the power pc chip? I know it is possible to do the osx 86 crack and get osx and hence runn power pc applications on a normal pc but I would like a wine type option.

T

Without emulation, no. There are two problems, one which is more fundamental than the other. Firstly, and fundamentally, OSX is a big-endian system, where as Linux is a little-endian system (see links for definitions), and the two aren't interchangeable. The second problem, which may or may not be a problem, is that older OSX executables will be compiled for the PPC chip, and so won't be understood by the x86 chip. More recent ones compiled "universally" contain both PPC and x86 binaries, so this would solve this problem.

However, the endian problem is the thing that prevents you running OSX executables without emulation.

Thanks for the info. Quite interesting and low level. Oh well back to the drawing board.

T

A bigger problem is that OS X apps depend on tons of Apple proprietary libraries and engines and stuff that will be very hard to recreate.

Do you have any technical links to back this up? The PPC, MIPS, and Sparc processors (there are likely others) support setting the endian mode on boot so they can operate either way. The default, and what I believe Apple used on PPC, is big-endian.

However, I am fairly confident that x86 does not support booting in either mode (my oldish Intel x86 manual seams to back that up) so Apple must be using little-endian for there system there. Eitherway, it shouldn't matter to Apple as the compiler can handle making that decision and except for some very very low level code it shouldn't effect the programmer much.

I believe the biggest hurdle is all the libraries Apple has developed that don't run outside of OSX.

No, but to refer back to TheBrick's original post, he stated that he wanted to run OSX apps on x86 Linux - which I'm fairly sure doesn't support switching between endians (though I could be wrong, I'm not an expert).

And agreed, the biggest problem would be the libraries.

There is of course the possibility of recompiling the particular app to run natively under Linux, depending on how much OSX specific code there is in there - if it all uses open-source GNU stuff then it may be possible.