convert IRIX/mips library to Linux/x86library

[Bernd Hofner]

Hello,

I want to port an application from an old Silicon Graphics Indigo workstation
running IRIX and, as far as I know, using a MIPS architecture to a Linux running
on a x86 machine.

I got most of the C source, but a few functions are only available as a library
(*.a), probably written in Fortran.

Using objdump -a I can see that the objects contained in the lib are in the
elf32-big format. I guess I have to convert into the elf32-i386 format.
I tried to use
    objcopy -O elf-i386 oldlib.a newlib.a
but that complains: Unable to change endianness of input file(s).

Is there any way to get this done?
I would suspect that endianness is not my only problem. The assembler formats
would probably also be different, or not? 

Best regards,

Bernd