Suggestion...

[dlefevre]

Hi there...

I am a brand new user of this project and I have to say I appreciate it very much.

I do have a suggestion I hope you would think about. I hope at some point to set up a Raspberry PI as development server. Since XAMPP is built for situations like this and the PI could turn out to be such a great way to put together a quick and easy server, I really hope that XAMPP eventually puts together an ARM version... maybe even something specifically for the PI, though maybe not as I think small ARM servers of all types could be a great thing for web developers.

I have some knowledge of Apache, and I understand that ARM builds of it are a little bit of a pain, but I still thought this was a good enough idea to throw out there to the community.

[JonB]

That is probably something that 'may' happen. Notice all those conditionals? There are multiple reasons:

A. Currently, the predominant use of Arm processors is in phones/tablets/netbooks (maybe netbooks is a dead-end?), not PC-like units. I (personally) have the hots for an "APC" (a VIA android Itsy PC)

B. There's a darn good question about how many OS's (variants) that can be supported.

C. Oddly enough, I suspect that Win 8 RE will get a lot of builds. I have not read all the license limitations on devices yet.

D. Much like the Mac - these are closed eco-systems right now - you need to have one and learn it before you can do much more (never mind having support folks) Just look at the MAMP/XAMPP/MAMPP state of affairs, ditto poor old Solaris.

E. All in all - this is relatively virgin territory, but I'm sure its of interest to many. "Personally" - I am virtualizing everything (going the Oracle{Sun} Virtual Box route). That route at least bridges the 'host OS' issue.

Thanks for asking/suggesting -- I have several times had to explain to people that Linux builds are processor-specific -- and thus -- XAMPP is NOT going to run on your box/tablet/whatever (which is a sign of how poorly these things are understood).

Good Luck

[dlefevre]

Virtualizing a x86 host sounds like a darn good idea. Again, I have absolutely no clue when I will get my hands on a PI, but it sounds like something worth looking into.

For now I will happily put XAMPP on the small Thinkcenter I bought for the purpose. Thanks for replying to the idea.

[JonB]

Looking back now, I guess I didn't say this: You cannot virtualize a different processor -- period -- (sadly). They have different instruction sets, which is why PPC code won't run on Intel Macs (for instance). Or Itanium on X64, ditto all the other examples I made. Which is also why there will be Windows 8 RE for tablets - but - it won't run Office x86/64. MS may come up with an Office for ARM that you get in a license bundle, but it would have a different installer (could be on a common DVD probably). When the code is compiled, in order to become an executable, the source and 'destination' processors' instruction sets have to be binary compatible. LOL - that means a lot of things have to be 'just so'. "see assembler programming".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_architecture

Good Luck

JonB <== former Assembly/OS programmer

Note: Adobe has made OS independence possible to an extent, but that is on the SAME processor family.

[Brallion]

Using the binfmt_misc kernel extension you can run x86 binaries as if they were native. This is accomplished through a layer of emulation. There is a performance hit, but it would still be very useful to display simple pages.

[mccalleyt]

Actually you can virtualize a arm processor using qemu. http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page You can emulate many processor architectures. I want say I saw a fourm that tells how to build a webserver using raspbian.