fun with PPC

I recently received an old Apple G5. Even after a decade its dual 64bit PPC CPUs and 8GB of RAM make it quite a capable machine. So when I sent my primary box to the lab, I decided to spend a day on setting it up as a development workstation.

With Apple not supporting the PPC processors line since Snow Leopard, I decided to go with a Linux setup. I tested a few alternatives: Fedora 12, Yellow Dog, Ubuntu and Debian Lenny and Squeeze. Eventually choosing Squeeze as it offered good hardware support and a more minimalist UI. Too bad CrunchBang does not support PPC, it is by far my favorite distribution for a desktop. Overall, installation of Squeeze was a breeze, more info can be found here.

My primary programming languages these days are Scala for the back end and GWT for the front end, so the next step was getting them to work.

Scala
The latest Scala package on debian repositories is 2.7.7, so you will need to download the latest from Scala's site and configure appropriately. So far so good, but a simple test yields bad news, Scala was super slow. After further digging I learnt that the root cause was the JVM: Squeeze comes pre-packaged with OpenJDK which is extremely slow to the point of unusable on PPCs as it is running in interpreted mode. Luckily, there is a simple solution, installing IBM JDK found here. Make sure to download the 32-bit if you are using a G5 and that libstdc++5 and libgtk1.2 packages are installed

GWT
To develop for GWT you need to have Eclipse with the GWT plugin installed. This part is easy, just make sure you download the 32bit version of Eclipse if you are using a G5. The troubles begin when you are finally ready to debug: GWT debugging is dependent on a browser plugin that unfortunately is not supported on PPC Linux. Luckily, the GWT code is open, so with jumping a few hoops, you can make it work using the following steps:

1. make sure xulrunner and xulrunner-devel packages are installed

2. download GWT source:
$ svn checkout http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ trunk
$ svn checkout http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/plugin-sdks/ plugin-sdks

3. copy the plugin SDKs from the x86 version as a PPC version:
$ cp -R plugin-sdks/gecko-skds/gecko-1.9.1/Linux_x86-gcc3 plugin-sdks/gecko-skds/gecko-1.9.1/Linux_ppc-gcc3
$ cp -R plugin-sdks/gecko-skds/gecko-1.9.1/Linux_x86_64-gcc3 plugin-sdks/gecko-skds/gecko-1.9.1/Linux_ppc64-gcc3

Note that gecko-1.9.1 maps to firefox 3.5, so if you are attempting to compile for a different version you will need to change the path accordingly. Read the make file for the complete version numbers mapping.

4. Replace all the files in Linux_ppc-gcc3/lib, Linux_ppc-gcc3/bin, Linux_ppc64-gcc3/lib, Linux_ppc64-gcc3/bin with the "real" ones from your system, they are all found either in /usr/lib/xurlrunner-devel-1.9.1/sdk/lib or in /usr/lib.

This assumes you running xulrunner version 1.9.1, otherwise, your path may differ.

5. prepare to compile:
$ cd trunk/plugins/xpcom
$ export BROWSER=ff35
$ export DEFAULT_FIREFOX_LIBS=/usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.1/sdk/lib/

Again, this assumes you are running xulrunner version 1.9.1 and trying to compile for Firefox 3.5, you will need to changes these if you system is running different versions.

6. edit the install-template.rdf file, adding an entry for Linux PPC after the other platform entries:
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_ppc-gcc3</em:targetPlatform>

7. finally, compile GWT from source
$ make clean
$ make

This will create a Firefox plugin named "gwt-dev-plugin.xpi" in the prebuild directory, install it using Firefox.