Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!news.glorb.com!news2.glorb.com!news-out.octanews.net!indigo.octanews.net!auth.brown.octanews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: Running binaries for other architectures on Darwin References: <2011040817194216807-spammersgohere@spaminvalid> From: Doug Anderson Organization: Rare Date: 13 Apr 2011 08:47:47 -0700 Message-ID: <93lizeup98.fsf@ethel.the.log> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii User-Agent: Emacs Gnus Lines: 27 NNTP-Posting-Date: 13 Apr 2011 10:47:47 CDT X-Complaints-To: abuse@octanews.net Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.sys.mac.system:676 Geico Caveman writes: > I have a few programs available over an NFS mount that are targetted > at the Linux AMD64 architecture. They use Xorg/X11, which is available > on my Mac (Xquartz). > > I am running Snow Leopard on an Intel 64-bit machine. I am certain > that if I ran Linux on the same hardware, I would be able to run those > programs (there are linux distributions available which can transform > a mac into a linux machine - they have been around since the PPC days). > > So, far, I have been getting by with a virtual machine running lubuntu > and running it via VMware. > > My question is - is there a binary translator of some sort that will > allow me to run these programs on the mac "natively" ? As far as I know, the answer is no, as it usually is to running executables made for one operating system on a different operating system. (The virtual machine solution which you are already using is as close to "yes" as one usually gets.) The fact that both linux and OS X are layers on top of unix variants, and the fact that they both run X windows means that you might be able to recompile your software on OS X, if you have the source code. But your linux executables won't work without a virtual machine.