[HN Gopher] The challenges of building modern open source softwa...
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The challenges of building modern open source software on PowerPC
Mac OS X
Author : hollimolli
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-04-09 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.netbsd.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.netbsd.org)
| xxpor wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised there isn't mention of big endian issues.
| Even if libraries nominally support it, I'd be willing to guess
| there's a lot of bugs out there due to a lack of active use.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Not to worry, NetBSD has also done their part to make BE really
| easy to test - they have a big-endian ARM image that you can
| run on Raspberry Pi hardware, so you don't need an
| ancient/exotic/expensive box.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Macs of this era shipped with a buggy version of GCC 4.x. Often
| need to compile with GCC 3.3 if you expect something to work.
| rurban wrote:
| I bought a special power macbook from a friend just to be able to
| support some import programs I maintained on power BE and double-
| double. Thanksfully those times are over for over a decade now.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"dashboard widgets"_
|
| Oh man, despite its technical flaws (crashes and bad
| performance), I still really miss the Dashboard feature from
| those old Mac OS versions!
|
| Just recently, Apple have started reintroducing desktop Widgets
| to macOS. But I wish you could make them work like the old
| Dashboard, ie instantly go to them with a swipe gesture or a Fn-
| key press.
|
| The old Dashboard was feature just so fast and easy!
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> The old Dashboard was feature just so fast and easy!_
|
| And, amazingly, was HTML/CSS/JS based (for widget development).
| parl_match wrote:
| Swipe left from the right edge with two fingers. Command+Expose
| button.
| linguae wrote:
| I love the Tiger through Snow Leopard era of Mac OS X, and I feel
| I could be productive on a G4, G5, or early Intel Mac for
| lightweight computing tasks, though I'd need to use another
| device for web browsing and for handling modern file formats.
|
| I think one of the major challenges of using modern software on
| early versions of Mac OS X (and even on current macOS releases)
| is the fact that Linux has become the de-facto standard Unix-like
| operating system, and modern Linux with systemd, Wayland, dbus,
| and other technologies have deviated greatly from POSIX and other
| classical Unix technologies. Granted, the world has moved on
| since the last POSIX revision, and commercial Unix (e.g.,
| Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.) is not as commonplace compared to 20
| years ago. Still, this has impacted the BSDs; their development
| communities are more conservative and some people have strong
| feelings about technologies like systemd and Wayland, but since
| Linux has a higher marketshare and an increasing amount of
| software is written for it without regard for the BSDs and other
| systems, then Linux has become the standard and the BSDs have to
| deal with a fragmented software base that once cared about
| portability among *nix systems.
|
| I wonder, though, how difficult would it be to replace older
| versions of Darwin (the open-source BSD and Mach layers of macOS)
| with updated code while ensuring the proprietary layers running
| on top of Darwin still work? This might be a good approach for
| helping older macOS versions run newer software, as well as
| adding compatibility layers to deal with Linuxisms. I remember
| reading about experiments updating the kernels of NeXTstep and
| Rhapsody in a similar fashion.
| znpy wrote:
| > though I'd need to use another device for web browsing and
| for handling modern file formats
|
| Have you tried running something xquartz and have, say, firefox
| running on sone other computer on the network? As long as
| you're on a fast lan with low noise (basically cable gigabit
| ethernet?) it should be mostly okay? You'd have to redirect
| audio as well though...
| user982 wrote:
| What's the best, most seamless option for this kind of LAN-
| hosted browser? X11 forwarding, Apache Guacamole, something
| else?
| znpy wrote:
| X11 (no forwarding, it's really meant to be that way -
| originally at least) would be the simplest and lightest. If
| you're on a private lan you might also turn off
| cryptography... the powerpc cpu probably either has no
| crypto acceleration or acceleration for old cyphers.
|
| Other solutions might work... guacamole could work but
| would use a whole other desktop (whereas x11 would still
| have some resemblance of integration).
|
| If you're okay with remoting the whole desktop, xrdp and
| vnc are also options...
| SpecialistK wrote:
| > I wonder, though, how difficult would it be to replace older
| versions of Darwin (the open-source BSD and Mach layers of
| macOS) with updated code while ensuring the proprietary layers
| running on top of Darwin still work?
|
| This is something I've thought about a lot and would love to
| see pursued.
|
| We know that the XNU kernel from Snow Leopard still lists PPC
| (https://github.com/apple-oss-
| distributions/xnu/tree/xnu-1504...) but it probably won't be
| easy to build and replace a 10.5 kernel with.
|
| The Hackintosh community did a lot of kernel hacking and custom
| kexts early in the Intel transition. It would be great if those
| people pivoted to PPC backporting or sharing their experiences
| once Apple drops x86 support in the near future.
| samatman wrote:
| > _commercial Unix (e.g., Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.) is not as
| commonplace compared to 20 years ago._
|
| Other than macOS, you mean? It remains a licensed Unix.
|
| I've rarely run into difficulty running FOSS software on macOS,
| although I've mostly stopped trying with anything with a GUI;
| not because Linux-oriented GUI programs don't work but because
| they subvert too many of my expectations, and I prefer to using
| something Mac-oriented and ideally Mac-native.
|
| Just to confirm that, I downloaded GIMP, it loads fine,
| scribbled around on a canvas. Went to close it and it popped up
| one of those dialogue boxes telling me to either save the file
| or lose my work. I've grown rather accustomed to programs just
| behaving correctly, which is to close down, and open up again
| exactly as I left them. But it does seem quite functional in
| the usual sense.
|
| There are some tools which are entirely Linux specific, rr
| comes to mind.
| haunter wrote:
| I have a Macbook with the last Snow Leopard (10.6.8) which
| supports PPC through Rosetta and Xcode.
|
| Generally speaking web browsing is the biggest problem if you
| care about that because there is virtually no supported modern
| browser (apart from Lynx but that's text based). And even if
| there would be one the web is totally different compared to ~2010
| era. Adblocking is a _must_ and without that any site with ads
| kills the old Core 2 Duo CPUs
| asveikau wrote:
| I have an old g3 tower that has 10.4 on it. Haven't powered it on
| in years. I got it in the mid 2000s to port code I'd written for
| gnustep to cocoa. Later I wrote a bit of ppc asm. It was a cool
| instruction set.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| This was already posted 3 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39951524
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(page generated 2024-04-09 23:00 UTC)