The NVidia card being unable to drive two monitors is a little annoying, and the lack of support for skype and chrome is a bother, but I think I can build chrome… There’ll probably be no flash, I imagine.
You realize chrome has already been built for PowerPC and in Debian, right? Obviously it’s called “chromium” rather than “chrome”, since the latter is the proprietary google-only build of the former, but there’s no reason why you would *need* to rebuild it.
In fact, I would heartily recommend against building chromium, if you can avoid it. Last time where I had to do that, it required 1.5G of sources, about 10G of compiled objects, and about 7 hours on a reasonably modern system…²
Yeah, I’d prefer not to build a browser. The last one I re-built was firefox back when we were allowed to call it firefox on Debian. No fun. But alas, I cannot install the bins…
cjac@bluebell:~$ sudo apt-get install chromium
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package chromium is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
chromium-bsu chromium-browser
E: Package 'chromium' has no installation candidate
cjac@bluebell:/usr/src/deb$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
[sudo] password for cjac:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
chromium-browser : Depends: chromium (>= 10) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
cjac@bluebell:/usr/src/deb$ apt-get source chromium-browser
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
NOTICE: 'chromium-browser' packaging is maintained in the 'Git' version control system at:
git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-chromium/pkg-chromium.git
Skipping already downloaded file 'chromium-browser_34.0.1847.116-1~deb7u1.dsc'
Need to get 681 MB of source archives.
Get:1 http://debian.osuosl.org/debian/ wheezy/main chromium-browser 34.0.1847.116-1~deb7u1 (tar) [681 MB]
1% [1 chromium-browser 4,039 kB/681 MB 1%] 423 kB/s 26min 39s
I don’t think there is powerpc support for the v8 javascript engine, so chromium is unlikely to build, youl’ll have to do with firefox or midori or the gnome browser or some other browser based on javascriptcore.
no easy task: at the very least someone would need to patch into v8 an existing baseline javascript interpreter, but that code is unlikely to be accepted upstream, and it would only make it as slow as firefox or webkit already are on powerpc, so a lot of effort for very little gain.
to make it run as fast as it runs on more popular architectures some ppc asm and dynamic recompiler guru with a lot of time on his hands and very little common sense would need to produce a fast baseline jit engine and a very advanced optimising dynamic recompiler to match the ones available for x86, amd64 and arm.
i doubt there is someone out there willing to: even openjdk was dead slow on ppc because it lacked a jit engine and i doubt it gained one since i last checked. the only virtual machine getting some powerpc love that i know of is luajit.
7 responses to “Debian on PowerPC successful”
You realize chrome has already been built for PowerPC and in Debian, right? Obviously it’s called “chromium” rather than “chrome”, since the latter is the proprietary google-only build of the former, but there’s no reason why you would *need* to rebuild it.
In fact, I would heartily recommend against building chromium, if you can avoid it. Last time where I had to do that, it required 1.5G of sources, about 10G of compiled objects, and about 7 hours on a reasonably modern system…²
Yeah, I’d prefer not to build a browser. The last one I re-built was firefox back when we were allowed to call it firefox on Debian. No fun. But alas, I cannot install the bins…
I don’t think there is powerpc support for the v8 javascript engine, so chromium is unlikely to build, youl’ll have to do with firefox or midori or the gnome browser or some other browser based on javascriptcore.
hmm… how much effort would it take to get v8 js to build on ppc, I wonder? ;-)
no easy task: at the very least someone would need to patch into v8 an existing baseline javascript interpreter, but that code is unlikely to be accepted upstream, and it would only make it as slow as firefox or webkit already are on powerpc, so a lot of effort for very little gain.
to make it run as fast as it runs on more popular architectures some ppc asm and dynamic recompiler guru with a lot of time on his hands and very little common sense would need to produce a fast baseline jit engine and a very advanced optimising dynamic recompiler to match the ones available for x86, amd64 and arm.
i doubt there is someone out there willing to: even openjdk was dead slow on ppc because it lacked a jit engine and i doubt it gained one since i last checked. the only virtual machine getting some powerpc love that i know of is luajit.
Ah, yes, I missed that. Oops.
Ah well. Firefox^WIceweasel isn’t a bad browser, either.