Have been reading late last year someone in France I think it was working to make Haiku run on a Amiga based system from aCube. I believe the aCube systems are PPC based.
Since I am a fan of Amiga and like the idea of a known system that Haiku will run on, will there be any limitations to running Haiku on a PPC based system versus a Intel based system?
By limitation I mean available software downloadable from Haikuware, will those apps run on both Intel and aCube based Haiku system or easy for an end-user to take the intel application and make it run on the aCube PPC system?
Or does each Intel based app need to be updated to work on PPC also so even if they do get Haiku running on aCube, their will be less apps to run on it since all are made for Intel these days?
Just curious if I end up getting an aCube system one day that I will not have as much available to me since most support is for Intel Haiku.
PowerPC and the Intel x86 are two completely different processor architectures. This means that, without a software compatibility layer, binaries compiles for one architecture will not run on another. At current, there is a good example of this: Windows 8 and Windows RT. They are pretty much identical operating systems, just compiled for two different processor architectures, Windows 8 for x86 and x86-64 (x86 with 64 bit extensions, so software for x86 will run on it, it’s not a completely different architecture, just a derivative) and Windows RT for ARM. As you may know, classic Windows programs will not run on Windows RT, and this is due to the processor architecture being different to the x86 environment most desktop Windows machines run.
While a software compatibility layer can be written, it takes a lot of effort and code. Two systems that i know implement such a layer to run applications from different architectures are AROS (for legacy 68k Amiga support on x86 machines) and both Mac OS 7-Mac OS X 10.4 (for Apple’s transition from 68k to PPC) and Mac OS X 10.4-6 for Apple’s transition from PPC to x86).
Short answer: no, all current applications from Haikuware will not run on an aCube system, even if Haiku was compatible with PPC, which it isn’t (yet).
There’s a PPC build project for Haiku, but it hasn’t seen update work in a while and the ISO was taken off the download list. Not sure if it ever was compatible with the aCube systems or not, anyway.
I wish it would see more activity, though - it’d be sweet to be able to run it on my old Macs…
Well it probably wouldn’t be too hard to pull off with QEMU user mode emulation… running x86 binaries on PPC that is. There would still have to be a complete of Haiku to PPC hough which there isn’t.