Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 9:47 am Post subject: Mac on Intel Compatibility
As of January 2006, Apple has finally begun shipping production machines that contain Intel Core processors. Despite the marketing claims from Apple, not all of your existing applications can run on Mac on Intel machines. NeoOffice is one of these applications.
At the present time, Mac on Intel support is available for NeoOffice 2.0 in an alpha form. This work is ongoing.
Specifics appear below.
When will NeoOffice 2.0 run on Mac on Intel?
NeoOffice 2.0 supports both PowerPC based Macintoshes and Intel based Macintoshes. Currently NeoOffice 2.0 is in a pre-release state, meaning it may contain serious bugs that may cause the application to crash or to not work at all.
NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha for Intel is currently available as a free download. This is the first release supporting Intel machines and it is a pre-release Alpha build and may still contain unknown bugs that cause the software to crash.
Keep visiting trinity and the forums for more information regarding the development of NeoOffice 2.0.
Why isn't NeoOffice 2.0 a "Universal" application?
Universal applications contain code for both PowerPC and Intel machines. When they're actually being used, however, the code for the other processor type never gets used and just wastes space on your hard drive.
For Neo, going Universal would increase the size of the download substantially. The disk image is already 100 MB +, and doubling its size would cause many users to have to download a very large amount of software they'll never need on their computer. Additionally, it would cause the bandwidth required to host a NeoOffice mirror site to double without any major benefit. While Universal makes sense for smaller applications, for large downloads it is more efficient to keep separate installers for PowerPC and Intel.
Why can't NeoOffice 1.2 run on Mac on Intel?
NeoOffice 1.2 is a PowerPC based application. All PowerPC based applications are forced to run within the Rosetta environment. Unfortunately, contrary to Apple's marketing claims, Rosetta cannot run all PowerPC applications on Mac on Intel computers seamlessly...and customers need to read the fine print. Classic PowerPC applications will not run, and neither can Rosetta applications that embed Java directly
NeoOffice 1.2 is an application that requires Java to be embedded within it in order to run critical portions of the application. Without Java, NeoOffice 1.2 cannot run. Since Java is not embeddable by Rosetta (even though Java 1.4 is available for native Mac on Intel applications), NeoOffice 1.2 cannot run within the Rosetta environment.
Why can't NeoOffice/J 1.1 Final or 0.8.x run on Mac on Intel?
NeoOffice/J 1.1 and 0.8.x require the Apple Java VM version 1.3 specifically. They cannot run on any Java version other than 1.3. While Mac on Intel computers support Java versions 1.4 and 1.5, there is no version of Java 1.3 that can run on Mac on Intel computers, either natively or within Rosetta. As a result, NeoOffice/J 1.1 and 0.8.x will never be able to run on Mac on Intel computers.
To allow NeoOffice to run on Mac on Intel, Java 1.4 or higher is required; this is why the NeoOffice 1.2 effort was undertaken.
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Last edited by OPENSTEP on Mon Jul 31, 2006 9:27 am; edited 1 time in total
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