A blog about my experiences with bioinformatics, operating systems, and random other technologies and bits.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

GMP 4.2.1 on OS X 10.3.9

You don't want the same company that makes the iPhone to make your enterprise servers. Regardless, it seems I'm stuck with using a small OS X 10.3.9 cluster. We can't upgrade easily (I won't get in to the reasons, though some of them are partly Apple's fault of course), but suffice to say that despite having such a nice machine, we are stuck in the 32 bit land of the not so ancient OS X 10.3 and can't even get things like Java JDK 1.5 or 1.6 (an added incentive to upgrade to OS X 10.4 from Apple...).

At any rate, if you also have these problems (unlikely, but I know some of you are out there), here are the options I used to build GMP 4.2.1 with GCC 4.2.0 (prerelease):

CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS: -O3 -m32 -mcpu=7450 -mpowerpc -maltivec

make distclean && ./configure --enable-cxx ABI=32 && make && make check

Monday, July 2, 2007

Sun Consumer Products

Open Solaris isn't perfect for the end user yet, but it has a lot of potential. I'd like to show my support to Sun by buying something from them. There's the media kit, but even though I'm just wanting to show my support I think media kits are kind of useless since Open Solaris is updated so frequently. Star Office appears to be free with Open Solaris, so no need to buy that either. The one thing I found that appeared to be useful and affordable was a plugin for Open Office or Star Office that gives you bogging functionality within the office application. This isn't much, but it is only $10.00 and it is something I can use regularly.


What I'd really like to see is an Open Solaris User membership. Members could vote for new value added features and get some minimal amount of tech support. The tech support is secondary to me however, voting is what Open Solaris needs. I don't know of any commercially driven OS that has such a support option (then again, I'm not keen on every Linux or BSD distribution and I don't get paid to blog). I got the idea from Transgaming's Cedega. Transgaming holds a monthly poll for its subscribers, and subscribers get to cast as many votes as they have subscriptions. To me this seems like a great way to run a software business, and it would be great if someone employed the model for an operating system. I hope that someone will be Sun, though admittedly my hopes aren't high.