Status of Firefox on PPC64 Big Endian
So yesterday was the release ouf 24.12 T2/Linux and the maintainer, creator and mastermind behind, René Rebe, were at a lifestream on youtube and twitch. So I played around with T2 on my Powermac G5 and listened to the stream and had a small chat with him. The most important part is an actual browser on that machine so I asked for the actual status of firefox.
René replied that the problems with big endian still exist and occours so there is no Firefox for Big Endian Machines at the moment. Firefox builts well on all little endian processors, but not on the big ones. There is no better answer at this time, but I hope he can do something when he have the time. Because to make that clear: there is not a big audience who is working on big endian ppc64 processors like my 970MP is in the world and I believe he get's not enough feedback and attention for his work for the open source community. But this is another part.
Debian also faces the problem of not building firefox for ppc/64, but they have other important things to do than to fix that.
I know there were patches from oracle for big endian firefox but I cant find the repository anymore. Maybe these patches and the Void Patches could do some important thing? [UPDATE] I found the patches for firefox.
I bet biggest problem are the people at firefox who doesnt care about big endian firefox builts for ppc64 because it is not important.
Ressources
- New Release Of T2/Linux
- Oracle Patches for Firefox
- PPC 750 Void Linux Firefox Patches
- void-packages-ppc750/srcpkgs/firefox/patches/big-endian-image-decoders.patch
- Debian Build Status Firefox
Tags: t2linux, powermacg5, linux, firefox
New Release Of T2/Linux
T2/Linux 24.12 with XFCE Desktop on Powermac G5
As you know, this weblog is about my 2005 Powermac G5 and how to use it in 2024 soon 2025 as a normal computing device. I installed different Linux Distros on an 1 TB NVMe Device while computing with 12 GB-Ram.
And today reached me the information that famous René Rebe did released T2/Linux 12.2024 [1]. They are pleased to announce T2 24.12 as a major update with a total of 37 pre-compiled base install ISOs for various Glibc, Musl and uClibc combinations are available for 25 CPU ISAs: