You Need a .NET SDK to Build a .NET SDK That’s the first thing you learn when you try to compile .NET from source. It’s a beautifully circular problem — like needing a car to drive to the dealership where you’re buying your first car. Microsoft ships pre-built SDKs for x86_64, ARM64, and s390x. But POWER? IBM’s legendary architecture that runs half the world’s banking systems? Sorry — you’re on your own. ...
Previously, on “Man Yells at POWER8” In Part 1, I told you about the time I decided to run AIX 7.2 inside a KVM VM on a Gentoo ppc64le host, on actual IBM POWER8 hardware, in my basement in Chicago. I monkey-patched Python 2.7’s sqlitecachec.py to make yum work. I nuked my entire system by installing OpenSSL 3.5 instead of 3.0. I got WebSphere Liberty running and deployed IBM’s DayTrader 7 — a Java EE benchmark app from 2005 that speaks EJBs, JPA, JMS, and looks like it was designed by someone who thought JSP framesets were the pinnacle of web technology. ...
Why Would Anyone Run AIX in 2026? It’s February 2026. I’m staring at an IBM S822 (8335-GCA) in my basement rack — a dual POWER8 server with 128GB of RAM and 20 cores that can do 160 threads with SMT8. This machine used to live in a datacenter running enterprise workloads. Now it runs Gentoo Linux. Yes, Gentoo. On ppc64le. Compiled from source. All of it. But Gentoo wasn’t enough. I wanted to run the OS that this hardware was designed for — AIX. IBM’s proprietary UNIX that still powers banks, airlines, and telecom companies around the world. The OS that most people have only seen in architecture diagrams. The OS that costs more to license than my car payment. ...
The Dream Back in the early 2000s, teenage me was obsessed with the iBook G4. That sleek white clamshell with its PowerPC CPU and AltiVec engine felt like the future. I couldn’t afford one then — but now, two decades later, I finally scored one: a 1.33GHz model for $67 on eBay, original box and all. Reality hit hard. The 60GB hard drive was dying The RAM was maxed at 1.5GB (after some firmware trickery) I destroyed the power button during an SSD upgrade This is the story of how I brought it back to life — and turned it into a (surprisingly capable) development machine in 2025. ...