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Old 12-15-2008, 01:35 PM   #1
pixellany
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Applications for ppc


In a recent thread, several of us were trying to help with Flash on a Playstation (PPC). Finally, someone observed that there is no Adobe flashplayer for PPC.

I did a bit of digging and could not find any apps offering a PPC version. But there are complete distros that offer PPC versions-----Does this mean that they (the distro providers) are re-compiling the kernel AND all the apps for PPC?

As a general rule, if you have the source code, can you recompile an application for the PPC architecture?
 
Old 12-16-2008, 06:27 AM   #2
Agrouf
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Yes, you can, unless the code is in asm or some other non-portable language. Python, C, perl, bash etc ... no problem. Unfortunately, noone has the source code for flashplayer, except those who don't care about PPC. You could still use an emulator like qemu to run flashplayer on a PPC architecture, but that makes it a little bit painful to run.

Last edited by Agrouf; 12-16-2008 at 06:30 AM.
 
Old 12-16-2008, 12:27 PM   #3
pixellany
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Does anyone know how the distros for PPC are done?---ie do they re-compile all the apps for PPC? Utilities? Libraries?
 
Old 12-16-2008, 01:12 PM   #4
Agrouf
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It depends on the distro.
Yellow Dog rpms are indeed compiled for the PPC processors.
Gentoo and LFS, obviously don't compile it at all.
Gentoo does provide some binaries compiled for PPC (like portage and the compiler itself: gcc) and then everything is compiled from that on your computer.
But yes, in order for the distro to run on a PPC processor, everything need to be compiled for the PPC processor (including utilities, libraries and programs). It's done exactly like the x86 distros are done, except they use a PPC conpiler instead of a x86 one, or a x86_64 one on x86_64 processors, or like MIPS one on MIPS processors, ARM, SPARC, etc... It's not different.
No need to "re-compile" actually, just need to "compile", since the software is usually provided by the author as source code (tar.bz2).
Indeed, the people at Debian, Mandriva, Red hat and stuff do need to compile the software for x86 and for all the processors they support in order to provide binaries for the processor they support (386, 586, PPC, etc). PPC is no different than others.
The only distros creators that don't need to compile software from source are those who rely on other distros to do that for them.

Last edited by Agrouf; 12-16-2008 at 01:14 PM.
 
  


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