My random biarch opinion / request for G5 account
Hi all,
Well, this is going to sound a bit silly, but I'm a happy Debian IA64
(Itanium) user, and it is a bit of a strange biarch system: native code
is _always_ LP64: there are no 32-bit tools, libraries or anything like
that. It's a very nice environment (zero confusion, basically) and great
for software development work.
Having said that, I can run old x86 linux binaries just fine: to do so,
I need x86 linux libraries (e.g. GTK, X11 etc) as well. I guess my
opinion, then, is that I'd be happy to see debian-powerpc adopt a
similar approach: support the running of (old) 32-bit powerpc linux
binaries by having a seperate set of "every day" libraries which live in
/legacy (take a look at the debian ia64 package "ia32-libs" to see what
I mean) but completely deprecate 32-bit everywhere else: no 32 bit tools
or static libraries, etc. Move cleanly to 64-bit and stay there.
(Surely Apple will release G5 notebooks one day soon? ;)
Duraid
P.S. Does anyone have a Debian G5 system that they'd be willing to give
me an ssh account on for a few minutes? (for benchmarking purposes, and
literally only a few minutes). If you could get back to me via email,
I'd appreciate it. I could also send the benchmarks - they're very
easily compiled and run.
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