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IBM Programming Technology (Apple) IT Technology

LinuxPPC64 Contest 184

Posted by Hemos from the something-to-post dept.
Robert MacFarlan writes: "IBM is sponsoring a Open Source developer contest for their Linux on POWER (Linux PPC 64) effort. The contest is designed to award and showcase innovative new open source applications that are designed or optimized specifically for Linux running on the PPC architecture. The contest also awards ports of existing applications from a predetermined list. Contest prizes include Segway HTs, Apple Power Mac G5s, and cash awards. "
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LinuxPPC64 Contest More

LinuxPPC64 Contest

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  • Apple? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by polyhue ( 38042 )
    Mentioning PPC gives an Apple topic automatically?
    • Yes

    • Re:Apple? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by FrothyBitter ( 848137 )
      That makes perfect sense, because IBM makes the PPC. Oh wait, you're right, that doesn't make sense at all.

    • Re:Apple? (Score:3, Informative)

      by tehshen ( 794722 )
      If you look at the topic list, it's in 'Hardware (Apple)', so it's in Apple.

      • Re:Apple? (Score:3, Informative)

        by remahl ( 698283 )
        But it isn't Apple hardware! It's all IBM. It's not even PPC, it's POWER, which Apple doesn't use.
        • I meant 'Technology (Apple)', not Hardware, if it makes it any better.
        • Well i can see How it got the Apple topic , as any advances on linux for power will also aid linux on PPC (Thus Mac hardware ,and newer Amigas for that matter)

          as you can see some of the instruction sets are a little diffrent however the core architecture is very simmilar and iirmprc(my press releases corectly) PPC is Power for the home computer(power being a server , and workstation chip arch)

          So i think including apple in this is ok , as it is not the main bit just an associate

        • Re:Apple? (Score:2, Informative)

          by Lars T. ( 470328 )
          RTFA: "Linux running on the PPC architecture". I bet most people running Linux on PPC or POWER run it on Apple hardware.
    • I was wondering that myself, but I guess then there's the question: how many vendors are there selling PPC-based desktops?

      Are there any that move anywhere near Apple's volume? So maybe in that sense, there's a de facto association, even if not a necessary one.

    • Re:Apple? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Seehund ( 86897 )
      Mentioning PPC gives an Apple topic automatically?

      Welcome to Slashdot, User 38... Oh.

      Yes. So does anything having anything to do with portable digital audio players. :)
    • Is there another consumer PPC64 machine (widely and affodably) available?
  • *ducking* - don't hit me

  • Apple? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Teknobob ( 43181 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @12:36PM (#11933186) Homepage
    My bet is that it's listed under Apple since the 2nd tier winners get:

    Apple Power Mac G5 and $1,000 cash prize.

    Either that or Hemos knows something we have only heard rumors about between Apple and IBM...
  • If contestants do not have direct access to LinuxPPC64 platforms such as IBM eServer or Apple Power Mac G5 to develop or port on, community-based resources may be found at the University of Portland School of Engineering.


    What about on a G4, using the Altivec extensions? Wouldn't this suffice? 64 or 32 bit is OK according to IBM, but optimized for 64. Won't a G4 suffice?

    • Re:G4? (Score:3, Informative)

      by FLAGGR ( 800770 )
      G4 != G5

      AFAIK, there are some of the G$ altivec instructions which will crash on the G5, which is why some OSX apps had to be ported. Plus, they want it for the POWER PPC64 architecture anyway, so no.

  • Porting wine? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SeanTobin ( 138474 ) * <byrdhuntr AT hotmail DOT com> on Monday March 14, 2005 @12:46PM (#11933307)
    Check out number 99 [linuxonpower.com]. They want someone to port wine!

    Now, porting between OS's on the same architecture is difficult. Porting between the same OS on different architectures can be easy, or insanely difficult. Porting a "not-an-emulator" that "ports" other applications running on a different operating system across a different architecture to run the "ported" application on the non-native architecture... well, the word difficult just doesn't seem to cut it.

    But, if anyone manages to do it they deserve a freakin' medal!

    • Re:Porting wine? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @12:49PM (#11933346) Journal
      The Darwine [opendarwin.org] project has winelib running on OS X, and aims to tie QEMU to WINE to allow windows apps to run with the binaries in the emulated environments and the wine calls running on the native platform.
      • Can you run Darwin on something other than a 440BX yet? I couldn't find any documentation.
      • Man I don't get it. Surely if you were porting winelib to Mac OS X you'd use the native Mac OS X widgets. That's the purpose of winelib, to use the native widgets of X11 on unix instead of the native widgets of win32 on Windows. Now look at the screenshot for Darwine, they've got what look like win32 widgets in Mac OS X, how the hell have they even done that?
        • The purpose is to use winelib to easily recompile applications designed for WIN32 to a Unix-like environment. WINE (IIRC) implements its own widgets, since native widgets don't behave appropriately for the emulation.

        • Re:Porting wine? (Score:4, Informative)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @06:02AM (#11941697) Journal
          Wine (and winelib) draws its own widgets, which look and behave the same way the Windows ones do. While, technically, it would be relatively easy to make them appear like native widgets, this would be a horrendous decision for two reasons:
          1. It would remove an important visual clue that the application in question is not a native application, and will not behave like one.
          2. It would encourage the attitude that having an app running in Wine is `good enough,' and make native ports (with UIs consistent with the rest of the system) less attractive to developers.
    • I believe that virtual pc does the job. So, it can be done and has been done. Although, porting of wine with hacks may not be the best way to accomplish the goal.
      • Virtual PC doesn't do quite the same thing. It "just" emulates x86 hardware. Wine in an implementation of (some) Win32 APIs which runs on x86 *nixen. With VirtualPC you need a copy of Windows, with Wine you don't.

        You need the x86 emulation layer to run Windows executables. Adding hooks for x86 executables running under an emulator to use native PPC implementations of the Wine libs sounds like a distinctly hairy exercise to me, but it would provide the best performance.

        With all these dual-core chips comi

    • Re:Porting wine? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:45AM (#11941086) Homepage Journal
      I can do this already. We did a little experiment last year. Using the open source decompiler Boomerang [sourceforge.net] you can turn a windows exe into C code. You can then simply recompile that source code on any platform using winelib [winehq.com] including non-x86 platforms like PPC. Of course, you then have to test the app and ensure that it still works, which takes a fair bit of effort as winelib isn't exactly that portable and Boomerang isn't that mature just yet. But it is possible, and it's truely the highest performance way to "run win32 apps on PPC".
      • Unless you got really lucky you are full of it.
        Sorry I just downloaded Boomerang and tried it on a small in house program. It segfaulted. Next I tried putty. I pretty small program only 380k. Blame segfault.
        From the boomerang website. "Boomerang will only work for the most trivial programs. "
        An dreams of using it to run win32apps on PPC in the near future is fantasy. I do wish them luck it is a great project but it is barley alpha and not a real tool.

        • Maybe when you downloaded it you should have looked at who one of the two principle developers are. *I* have no trouble decompiling things with Boomerang because I can go ahead and fix what needs to be fixed to get it working on the specific binary that I'm trying to decompile. You need to take your application procedure by procedure and work through the problems to get a good output. Point and click decompilation is still a fair few years off at the moment.
          • I suggest that you read your post. You make it sound like it is click and decompile.
            I tried it on three programs.
            Two we wrote in house and notepad.exe. I got no data from any of them. As I said it is not currently anywhere close to being a useful tool for the average user. Still it is a good project good luck.

    • It's been done (Score:2, Funny)

      by dilby ( 725275 )
      Port wine [portwineonline.com]

    • Porting WASTE? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by koko775 ( 617640 )
      Interesting how IBM's implicitly endorsing WASTE. Foolish AOL. Foolish, Foolish AOL.
    • It's not THAT difficult, you just need to add a CPU emulator. Of course, given that wine has about 2.5 active developers, that isn't very high on the priority list (especially since an emulated windows program will run very slowly).

  • Taxable income? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eric_ste ( 446052 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @12:48PM (#11933327)
    I know that this is a "contest" but since you kind of get paid (toyota prius) for work (a pice of software that works on PPC), would you include the price as part as your taxable income? What do the IRS people think about that?
  • The following contest is intended for viewing in the United States only (except in Puerto Rico) and shall only be construed and evaluated according to United States law. Do not proceed in this site if you are not a resident of, and located, in the United States (except Puerto Rico) at the time of entry.

    Unfortunatetly IBM really doesn't get it. The Linux community is international. This contest excludes some of the best kernel hackers (including Linus!).

    IBM, get with the program!

      • Why not exclude Paris, Geneva, Brussels as well?

        Its not like a Francophone could ever win but we dont want them polluting our name spaces with le terrible words franglais et le silly technical terms like ordinator, or, those merde language like Eifel.
      • Poor Quebec, always excluded from these contests.

        BTW, does anyone know the reason why this is? From what I understand it is due to them having a far different legal system than the rest of North America, but I don't really know the specifics.

        • Re:Open to US residents only (Score:5, Informative)

          by Inigo Montoya ( 31674 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @04:36AM (#11941434) Journal
          From cnews.canoe.ca [canoe.ca]:

          "While some companies permit Quebec entrants, many are scared away by unique rules that are mandated by the province's gaming agency.

          Quebec is the lone Canadian jurisdiction that requires security deposits, charges fees and enforces strict rules about draws valued at more than $100. Some American states also enforce rules that prevent their residents from participating in contests.

          In addition to requiring that all documents be written in French, Quebec's agency charges three per cent of the value of all national prizes, even if a Quebecer doesn't claim a prize, or 10 per cent of the value of a contest run exclusively in the province. The agency collected nearly $1.7 million in fees last year.

          In the rest of Canada, large contests are governed only by the federal Competition Act, a broad framework for promotional contests.

          "People often exclude Quebec just because they're afraid of these rules and don't really understand them," said Sharon Groom, a Toronto lawyer who represents many advertisers that run contests as a marketing tool.

          "They're not actually that bad but a lot of our clients will say we don't want to be bothered with doing this, so they exclude Quebec."

          • As a Canadian, I have for a very long time wondered why so many contests stated "Entries valid from anywhere in Canada excluding the province of Quebec" etc

            I thought perhaps this had to do a lot with all the weird scams that tend to come from there (every summer it seems we get a "scratch and win" where the "winners" call and get put on-hold with an expensive 900 number in Quebec), but I suppose that's a seperate issue.
    • Linus is a US resident, has been for a few years now. He's eligible, and he is running Linux on a dual G5 [slashdot.org].
    • It is not like it is exclusively IBM. There are tons of cool contests I'd like to participate in, but that are US only. Basicly, it is a matter of complying with every silly lottery rule anywhere in the world. If they could let foreigners participate on US terms, I'm sure most would have no problem doing that.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:49AM (#11941099)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It was odd, they didn't mention this to us. Anyway, we have access to an IBM Power5 cluster. Maybe I should enter this.

  • a segway? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by megabeck42 ( 45659 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:50AM (#11941297)
    So, wait, if I win tier 1, can I elect the tier 2 prize? Who wants a segway anyways? I think a better incentive would have been Apple Cinema displays..

  • Meta: Apple? IBM? Developers? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lars T. ( 470328 ) <Lars,Traeger&googlemail,com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @04:38AM (#11941441) Journal
    In case somebody wonders about the Apple comments: this appeared in the Apple section yesterday (with an Apple G4 icon IIRC), but was moved to developers.slashdot.org. Which clears up another confusion: this is not a dupe.

  • Whole new meaning to 'IBM Compatable' (Score:5, Funny)

    by Associate ( 317603 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @04:53AM (#11941478) Homepage
    Remember when IBM Clone or Compatable meant something running DOS or Windows on and Intel chip? What irony.
  • The contest is designed to award and showcase innovative new open source applications that are designed or optimized specifically for Linux running on the PPC architecture

    I don't get it. Are they rewarding the project that comes up with the poorest code portability? I always thought that one of the strongest points of Open Source Software is portability across platforms (OS and CPU architectures). Does IBM (in the role of a strong platform vendor) publicly promote going in the opposite direction? It is un

    • Re:What is the award for? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Amiga Trombone ( 592952 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @06:06AM (#11941716)
      I don't get it. Are they rewarding the project that comes up with the poorest code portability? I always thought that one of the strongest points of Open Source Software is portability across platforms (OS and CPU architectures). Does IBM (in the role of a strong platform vendor) publicly promote going in the opposite direction?

      I'd expect that since most code developed on x86 can be ported to PPC, the opposite is probably true as well.

      But that's the problem - most Linux PPC Linux apps are ports of x86 apps.

      The object here, I think, is to promote PPC as a primary platform for Linux development, rather than a platform applications are ported to as an afterthought.

      • Re:What is the award for? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore&gmail,com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @11:13AM (#11943183) Homepage Journal

        The object here, I think, is to promote PPC as a primary platform for Linux development

        And to illustrate the advantages of the PPC arch, maybe including AltiVec, through optimization. While you can develop anything for the PPC, I would guess the winning entries would make good use of the benefits of the PPC arch vs. the Intel/AMD archs.

        Some things do better on PPC, some things don't, and IBM is likely looking for good examples of the former.
  • 1st Tier Prize: 5 - Segway&#174; Human Transporter
    2nd Tier Prize: 50 - Apple Mac G5's
    3rd Tier Prize: 50 - $1,000 cash prizes
    Well, I think that 2nd tier prize is better than 1st tier, but that's just /me.
  • After scoping out the competition [slashdot.org], I think I'll sit this one out.

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