IA64PortStatus

Revision 1 as of 2005-05-28 21:07:44

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IA64PortStatus

This page summarizes the state and goals of the IA64 Ubuntu port. Though not yet supported, the IA64 flavour of Hoary is available from the archive, and is in a somehow decent shape. Specifically:

Target platforms

All Itanium 2 machines with ZX1 chipset. Hopefully all Itanium 2 machines should be supported but I don't have the hardware to test that.

Itanium 1 machines are currently out of my scope (these were sort of prototype machines anyway). I hope that at least the base install should work, but I don't expect to have X working (Nvidia driver issues).

State of the port

These are the current issues/problems I'm facing.

Packages status

(not considering universe/multiverse)

Outstanding issues

(not considering universe/multiverse)

As of March 10th, we have one main blocker:

OpenOffice.org

OO.o simply doesn't work on 64bit. A workaround is to use the same tweak as amd64: install OO.o with ia32-libs. Of course, a broken OO.o means language-support is uninstallable. Hence the above mentioned 32 problems: these are somehow "dep wait" ones. THAT ISSUE HAS JUST BEEN SOLVED, PENDING UPLOAD!

Mozilla Firefox Locales
This is a relatively new issue. Mozilla Firefox works just fine until one tries to install a locale support, in which case update-mozilla-chrome-registery segfaults. I've been able to reproduce that bug with various versions of Firefox (Debian 1-2 and 1-6, Ubuntu 1-6), so I'm not quite sure it's a mozilla bug. I suspect some side effect of not having language support installed on ia64. Any help in that area would be warmly welcomed.

Kernel status

The ia64 kernel is working just fine, as far as I can tell (at least it's not worse than anywhere else Smile :)

Installer status

After quite a lot of debugging and tweaking, we now have a fully fledged working Ubuntu installer, modulo some minor troubles when installing over serial line.

As far as I know, all HP Itanium 2 machines are supported. Itanium 1 will fail during X startup (missing Nvidia proprietary driver), but that's a non-issue since Itanium 1 is not on our target list.