There are some new clues that Mac OS X Leopard will drop G3 support. Its ReadMe file does not mention it, its web pages do not mention it and Apple even made a deliberate change to their 64bit webpage to remove the G3 mention recently. My take: This was not unexpected. For each new version Apple required one more additional feature in order to work (in the past it has been USB, then firewire etc) and now it's G4+. I bet that the client version of OSX after Leopard would require a supported 3D QuartzExtreme-compliant graphics card in order to boot up.
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Member since:2005-08-28
"(Are we really not worth an hour or two of processor time?)"
according to the purveyors of closed source software, the answer is apparently largely yes.
that said, re realplayer:
https://player.helixcommunity.org/2005/downloads/
(look for linux-ppc)
about flash:
why do you _want_ that anyhow ;-)
about firefox:
in that case it should just be a recompile, there is only one source tree (which of course you're free to download). it's just a bit of a minor b*tch to get right in compiling it by hand on your own. as to the various and sundy plugins, if they provide the source, just try compiling it... most likely the reason they are only providing an x86 version is that that's the type of machine the author of said plugin had (yeah I guess they could try a gcc cross compile, but I probably wouldn't even bother with that myself)
and if you're going to bring up DRI support, no there's none of it in terms of closed drivers, but for supported cards in xorg, it's just the same as elsewhere:
0001:10:14.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R100 QD [Radeon 7200]
$ glxinfo |grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
Member since:2005-07-09
Member since:
2005-08-02
Hum, looks like this runs equally well on x86, PPC, ARM, PA-RISC, Alpha, SPARC and whatever other weird architecture they may throw in.
Okay so if all it takes is a simple complile to solve the world's cross processor ills, then why isn't there realplayer or flash for PPC Linux? (Are we really not worth an hour or two of processor time?)
Why aren't Firefox updates for PPC Linux always released on the same day as the x86 version? (As several people from the Ubuntu forums can tell you -- that's not so. Several of us did a fair amount of troubleshooting for noobs who, when Firefox 1.5 didn't show up in Synaptic, went out to download and install via the command line. They all had x86 files. A trip to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ showed no PPC version avalible for download. In fact, we had a wait for Firefox 1.5 for PPC Linux/OS X to show up.)
And again regarding Firefox, if a compile is all it takes, then why are there significantly fewer plugins for Firefox PPC than work on the x86 version?
To me, this illustrates that many times it can take more than just a compile to make software function properly.