I remember reading at some point that the version of gcc bundled with OSX 10.x, x>=2, has extra extensions for the ppc (G3/G4) architecture. From the man page for gcc, OSX 10.4: In Apple's version of GCC, both cc and gcc are actually symbolic links to a compiler named like gcc-4.0; which compiler is linked to may be changed using the command gcc_select. Similarly, c++ and g++ are links to a compiler named like g++-4.0. Note that Apple's GCC includes a number of extensions to standard GCC (flagged below with ``APPLE ONLY''), and that not all generic GCC options are available or supported on Darwin / Mac OS X. In particu- lar, Apple does not currently support the compilation of Fortran, Ada, or Java, although there are third parties who have made these work. Are these extensions bundled with GCC (are they open-sourced) and thus available in Suse-ppc? Are they specific to OSX? Does gcc look for altivec optimizations if I feed it with -mcpu=7450 or -arch=ppc? The real meat of my question is if Apple's gcc is "better" than the standard version packaged with Suse. regards, Nathan Moore, PhD Assistant Professor, Physics Winona State University AIM:nmoorewsu skype:nathanmoore78 nmoore@winona.edu