Here is a very serious offer from Andrew Edward McCall for any PowerPC programmers out there. He is offering a Laptop to anyone that can port Haiku to the PowerPC platform. “Haiku on PowerPC isn’t going anywhere, this is due to me being unable to patch gcc and not having enough time to work on it. If anyone has time and experience and would like to work on porting Haiku to the PowerPC architechture, but needs equipment, I will send them out a Apple ‘Wallstreet’ PowerBook G3 to work on for free.”
As nice as it is to provide free hardware for a developer, a Wallstreet is a bit old. Circa 1998 with a maximum speed of 292 MHz. They can be found on eBay for around $100. I know anything is better than nothing, but as a point of information, a Wallstreet is not much to develop on. Good luck!
I completely agree
I offered as I know there are a lot of talented programmers who may have the skill and would like to play with PowerPC hardware, but have never had the inclination or cash to do so.
Its not really news worthy, I made a post to my blog as there is a link to it from HaikuNews.org and thought someone interested in Haiku might be able to make use of it. I didn’t expect for a second for it to appear on HaikuNews or OSNews.
I had BeOS running adequatly on a Pentium MMX 200 Mhz. Is Wallstreet slower than that?
I didn’t expect for a second for it to appear on HaikuNews or OSNews.
Well, I hope it’s not a problem– I figured some attention might give you more respondents to choose from.
I donated 1000$ to the Haiku project with the specific instructions to buy some ppc hardware to ensure Haiku would someday also run on ppc hardware, so I don’t see why this is such big news.
I was told by Axel, that he and several developers already have some Apple laptops, and that it would eventually get done. I then instructed them to do with the donation as they wished.
I asked for a receipt and still haven’t gotten it. I also asked that $300 be given to M. Overhagen for his work on the AC’97 driver (on which I had a bounty for recording input). This was achieved, although rather buggy. I never was informed of whether he got the money.
I am disappointed with the way they operate.
I’ve a G4 iBook, but I don’t want to partition the disk, and we’d have to have a working USB stack for it to even work (keyboard is USB iirc).
So there’s a few technical roadblocks (like essential bus subsystem support) aside from the build environment and gcc patches that are totally essential.
They will surely reply to you now
I agree with you that they should inform you about how the donation was used.
Is it worth bothering to port Haiku to PowerPC when Apple swtich to x86 ?
That’s one more reason to do it.
Open Desktop Workstation, embedded systems or kiosks, set top boxes…
Plenty of reasons to support PPC.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/factsheet.htm
You’re more likely to see a port to CELL-based hardware. A smart Haiku/PPC roadmap would probably be PPC32 -> PPC64 -> CELL. (CELL’s main processing unit runs PPC64 code.)
Personally I wouldn’t mind skipping the PPC32 step, but the installed base of PPC32 is huge.
Yeah thnx Tanner.
It gives me serious doubts about donating again. If it was 50 bucks I wouldn’t really care. But I don’t think what I donated was something to sneeze at.
If they don’t have the time to get an x86 box working and 99% of the people use x86 boxes then why fool with a design that apple will drop in a year anway?
Apple’s not the only ppc computer manufacturer. There are quite some,
starting from the big boxes by ibm, over the desktop and low end
servers by Genesi down to many little ppc devices coming from the
embedded world.
Maybe it would be a good to finish it (ie: x86 version) before thinking of a PPC port ?
I guess a complete x86 version is better than two incomplete x86 & PPC versions…
People are doing it for fun. If hacking away on ppc is fun, then I say go for it.
I’m looking so much forward to seeing more great news about Haiku. Wonder if they will, at some point, finally support my beloved AMD64…
I think having ports for different architectures early on is a good decison. It has been proven time and time again that the portability from the start and testing on different platforms greatly increases software quality. Some design blunders and bugs may get discovered much quicker too.
Even if Apple has nothing to do with the PPC future, these processors are nice. As an Amiga user and developer, I think an Haiku port on PPC would help me to feel myself concerned by this OS and port stuff. For comfort and development goals, I own a Windows laptop and a Linux desktop, but my Pegasos is my main machine.