On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 14:17 +0800, Hugh Griffiths wrote: > Has anyone had any luck with running apps specifically supported under > RedHat on a Mac, I have heard of YellowDog but wonder if there is a > way to get RedHat actually working on a Mac.
There are actually two issues you face: distro compatibilty, and rather more importantly processor architecture. If your app is provided only as an x86 binary tarball or x86 binary RPM, it wouldn't run on Red Hat/PowerPC any more than it would on YDL/PowerPC. Distro compatibility is usually a much less important issue. Often apps just install and work, especially on a different but still RPM-based distro of similar age. If they don't, you can usually kludge it by copying over a few extra libraries. Regarding distro compatibilty, Fedora Core 4 will support PowerPC I think. Fedora Core is produced by Red Hat and is derived from the Red Hat line of OSes. I think Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 will be based on Fedora Core 3, so maybe RHEL 4 will support PowerPC. I don't think any current versions of RH run on PowerPC ... but mostly it won't matter. If all you have is an x86 binary RPM / tarball, you might be able to run it using something like VMWare / Virtual PC / QEMU. To do so you'd need to have a minimal x86 Red Hat install in the emulator, not just the application. You'd also suffer a *major* speed hit. To give you any better answer than guesswork I'd need to know more about the app - in particular, if your need for Red Hat is because of support issues, x86-only binaries, or some distro compatibility issue. Knowing if the app is closed- or open- source would help too, as with open source apps you can often just recompile them for a new architecture and find they "just work". -- Craig Ringer
