[fpc-announce] Win a PowerMac G5 by porting FPC to Linux/PPC64

[Jonas Maebe]

Hello,

The Free Pascal Compiler team is proud to announce that the Free Pascal 
Compiler has been selected to participate in IBM's Linux On Power 
contest. The goal is to create a port for Linux running on PowerPC 64 
bit processors. The current compiler already contains support for Linux 
running on 32 bit PowerPC's and there is already a port for x86-64, so 
all the basics (PowerPC, Linux and 64 bit) are present. Nonetheless, 
the port will not be trivial (otherwise we would have done it ourselves 
already :)

The port is part of their Tier 2 tasks, which means the prize for 
accomplishing the port is a shiny new PowerMac with dual G5's running 
at 2 GHz, pre-installed as dual booting between Mac OS X and 
Linux/PPC64.

All ports will be judged by us (the Free Pascal team), and the first 
person to submit an accepted port via the linuxonpower.com website will 
win the prize. People from all over the world are elegible to enter the 
contest, except the unlucky souls living in Quebec.

More information available at http://www.linuxonpower.com/

Specific information about the Free Pascal port: 
http://www.linuxonpower.com/challenges.php?view=217

Now get coding! And no whining about chicken-egg problems! (having no 
G5, but wanting to complete the port in order to win a G5 :)


Jonas

PS: there's some information about places where you can get a 
Linux/PPC64 account on the linuxonpower website.
PS2: we are of course willing to help with information about the 
compiler, but the discussion will be limited to the fpc-devel mailing 
list, so that everyone has access to the same information. Since we are 
judges, we can obviously not participate in the contest ourselves.