Re: IDL for linux on Macintosh ppc

[Paras Patel <paras(at)ll.mit.edu>]

"sv(q)" wrote:

> Has anyone successfully found a work-around for installing
> IDL on a Macintosh ppc running linux?
>
> I have a dual boot G4 running Mac OS 9 and yellowdog linux
> (a
> port of redhat 6.0 to the ppc chip) and would like to run
> IDL
> on the linux partition. RSI supports linux, but only on the
> x86 architecture. Has anyone tried to address this problem?
> Does anyone have any interest in seeing IDL under linux on a
> Mac?
>
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I doubt that you'll *ever* get RSI to port to Linux/PPC. They have difficulty acknowledging support for distributions other than Red Hat.

Here is an exerpt I received from Tech Support at RSI when I dared asked what I needed to do to get Debian GNU/Linux working properly with IDL.

<Some specific detail omitted....>

The question of Linux support is difficult. No matter what we decide to do,
we will not be able to satisfy everyone. Research Systems offers a
cross-platform visualization and analysis environment. Linux is one of 12
operating systems we support. Due to resourceconstraints, we focus our
support on Redhat. This decision allows us to concentrate on the biggest
share of the Linux user community.

DISCUSSION:
Support for a single Linux distribution causes some problems, especially
since we have a strong international presence. In different countries, we
are getting growing interest for Debian, S.U.S.E, Slackware, etc.. With
issues related to versions of libraries and even the presence of native
libraries (like libc), we are in a situation where we are having to
statically link to these libraries to offer even minimal support to
non-Redhat vendors. The result is an ever expanding footprint for our
product.

Even within a single Linux implementation, we can not move as fast as the
Redhat. Their Web site lists 19 different Redhat Linux releases in the past
4 years. This release schedule is far more dynamic than most software
companies. It's more difficult to pace than most other operating systems. We
also find Linux to have far less concern for backward compatibility. The
last major release of IDL was in late 1998.  At the time we increase support
for the latest Redhat release, 5.1. By the time we released IDL 5.3 Redhat
has gone through several additional releases (5.2, 6.0, 6.1 and I believe
6.2). Each of these releases includes hurdles in our ability to support them
because of
differences in the included system libraries.


We also wrestle with the unique characteristics of the Linux community.
While many of our Sun, SGI, or HP users may take years to move to new OS
releases, Linux users, because of the lower cost, seem to migrate to new OS
releases much quicker. This creates a problem where we have OS releases that
are not backward compatible and users that move faster than we can release
products to support these new OS versions.

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