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Working, but not great. And the threading support is weak.

Journaling is currently being added.

Which makes it irrelevant right now. Until it's been released and proven to be stable and reliable, I don't see any widespread usage of it. (Plus, with FreeBSD 5's less the spectacular record of working well, I wouldn't consider a new FreeBSD filesystem for quite some time.)

USB support existed in the BSD's--I believe NetBSD had it first--about two years before Linux.

This feature isn't too useful outside of desktop/workstation usage, so most corporations won't be too terribly interested. Furthermore, USB support does exist in both operating systems now.

Jails have existed in FreeBSD for quite some time.

This is something that is missing in Linux. However, its usefulness is limited; When will Linux support Soft Updates?

Linux as a whole never will. Soft updates are a feature of individual file systems, of which Linux supports many. Soft updates and journaling file systems are mutually exclusive, and given the success of journaling file systems, I don't see them coming to Linux any time soon.

When will Linux use sysctl() instead of /proc?

Many years ago?
But even better: when will this make a huge difference in how either operating system works or in functionality?

How about virtual channels on a sound card?

Only a major concern for desktop users. Just about every sound card nowadays has hardware mixing; why not use that instead of your kernel-level (still software, not hardware!) mixer?

Many of the features you have listed are of no interest to many corporations, unless they are in the business of proving desktop operating system solutions.

Nobody said you gotta take it off. Multibooting macs is rarely a problem (remember old hfs users had to partition the hd to benefit from a smaller sector size) and you can boot OSX on a linux session with the amazing Mac on Linux.

Mac On Linux will let you run MacOS (including OS X) on any PowerPC system that runs Linux -- even if MacOS won't run natively on the hardware. Mac On Linux provides a MacOS-compatible virtual machine (but it doesn't emulate the processor, so it's nearly as fast as running native).

You can run OS X under Linux on a PowerPC using MOL. So I'd imagine that you could get OS X running on Darwin running on non-Apple ppc hardware.

Yeah and then you can boot OS X 10.2 in a window under Mac-on-linux.

I presume "mol" is referring to the Mac-on-Linux project.

http://maconlinux.net/news.html

The penguin seems a bit too into that apple...

Granted this screenshot isn't OS X, it should work there as well.

next

As for the questions asking why, I suppose it's the same reason you might want to run VMware on an Intel machine: develop/test for multiple platforms without rebooting; or get capabilities only available in one or the other without a reboot. What would be much more interesting to me is MOL (or equivalent) for OS X. Just like running Linux or FreeBSD under VMware for Windows, it would allow me to run LinuxPPC or maybe even NetBSD under OS X (Classic already takes care of OS 9, and probably better than this program could). And unlike the VMware on Windows case, my host operating system would be enjoyable to use. ;-)

As for the questions asking why, I suppose it's the same reason you might want to run VMware on an Intel machine: develop/test for multiple platforms without rebooting; or get capabilities only available in one or the other without a reboot. What would be much more interesting to me is MOL (or equivalent) for OS X. Just like running Linux or FreeBSD under VMware for Windows, it would allow me to run LinuxPPC or maybe even NetBSD under OS X (Classic already takes care of OS 9, and probably better than this program could). And unlike the VMware on Windows case, my host operating system would be enjoyable to use. ;-)

Taken from their User Guide:

Before continuing, you should also be aware of some requrements for running MOL:

• A supported PowerPC(TM) CPU (604[e], G3 or G4)
• Linux/ppc
• A 2.2 or 2.4 kernel
• MacOS 8.6* or later (9.2.1 is known to work)

Well, I got an iBook with OS X on it. A few seconds after starting to use it, I hated it beyond belief. It's slow, crashes WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY too much (ever tried Classic?), has a piss-poor window manager, and a thoroughly half-assed, thoroughly bastardized UNIX backend. In all, it reminds me of Microsoft Windows NT. (And yes, I upgraded its memory to 320 MB. It was still slow beyond words.)

So I trashed it and installed Linux on it, and installed MacOS 9 in Mac-on-Linux for the occasion when I needed it.

My complaints (or, rather, those that I can think of at the moment) about OS X are:

• It uses the circular alt-tab thing like someone else mentioned.
• It doesn't have a nice, clean, compact menu for switching windows, like the one in the top-right corner in MacOS 9 or the GNOME panel. The dock is thoroughly unsatisfactory for this need, because it's nothing but clutter, clutter, clutter. Optimally, the window switcher would be like the one in GNOME, which switches between windows, and not applications. (Yes, this is intended to imply that the switcher in MacOS 9 is somewhat deficient. GNOME forever.)
• All of the applications are slow. Even the terminal is slow!!! The GNOME terminal is much better.
• The standard-issue Web browser is Internet Explorer. I don't think I need to spell out why this is a problem.
• Classic is slow, slow, slow, and crashes a lot. Kids, don't use this at home.
• If something bad were to happen, and the UI froze up (which it did quite often, because everything is so slow), it's a little hard to start killing processes, because there is no Ctrl-Alt-F1 or similar to get to a console. (Linux rules.)
• Tcsh. 'Nuff said. (Yes, I'm bashing *BSD, which, in my opinion, is no better. Probably half of OS X's problems stem from it being derived from *BSD.)
• You can't open the terminal and run a GUI binary by typing in something like /Applications/SomethingOrAnother.app. You can do this without a hitch on both X and Windows.
• When I tried to switch back to MacOS 9 on bootup, it did something strange to my disk and I had to reinstall everything from the CDs that came with the machine.
• Installing a patch from Apple's Web site left me with a broken OpenSSH that can't talk SSH2. Trying to connect to an SSH2 server with it will cause it to crash.
• Their Java virtual machine is broken -- for some reason, jEdit does not exit cleanly if Cmd-Q is used (and yes, the jEdit developers looked into this problem, and were unable to come up with a solution other than not using Cmd-Q).
• Software Update goes through windowsupdate.microsoft.com. And it didn't work.
• No apt-get. See above.
• Apple has the gall to charge me money for an upgrade to OS X 10.1 to fix all of these and other problems that shouldn't have been there to begin with. Reminds me way too much of Windows, where M$ charges for bugfixes. I won't pay M$ for bugfixes, and I sure as hell won't pay Apple for bugfixes.
• Did I mention it's slow and crashes a lot?

By the way, the first time I took the plunge into the Mac was back in the days of System 7.1. I actually liked it. I like MacOS 9, too, though I wouldn't run it on bare metal because of the lack of memory protection (which isn't a problem -- I run it in MOL instead).

MacOnLinux has the same feature, for those of us not in Intel land.

Now, in addition to the fact that you can run MacOS 9 in MacOS X, you can also run MacOS 9 in LinuxPPC, which means dig those discs back out of the cupboard and install Photoshop. Get the best of both worlds.

As for the gimp arguement, I won't go there. Personally, I find gimp infinitely easier to use, but as with everything, everyone's different! ;)

I wonder if this will run binaries of Mac-on-Linux... Oddly enough, it may now be easier to run the binary of MOL than to port it to NetBSD! If anyone tries this, let us know!

LinuxPPC has the excellent implementation of Applixware and hopefully that will continue to happen, though of course there is some doubt with the recent decision by Applix to focus on server-side instead of the desktop app market. Supposedly StarOffice will be available for LinuxPPC but I don't think that has happened yet.

There was a reasonable comparison between Mac on Linux under LinuxPPC and the Classic environment under OS X which basically said that OS X does a better job intergrating the earlier OS's (just in a window) but they both are very reasonable.

I don't subscribe to the notion that these are in opposition to one another. That OpenBSD is not always the answer is very true. But all good things have their purposes. In fact, I use them both in my segmented, handy-man-special, home network:

OpenBSD for Mac68K (all these were bought for a pittance on eBay):
2 Quadra 700s: transparent firewall (ipf) and 3-legged NAT (ipnat)
Quadra 610: mail server (qmail)
Centris 610 (w/68040): dns server (djbdns)

LinuxPPC: (Bastille'd by using the Sparc trick on the FAQ)
2 7300s: apache and MySQL (soon to be PostgreSQL?)
9500/G3: mol / streaming with videod, icecast (Better choices are welcome.)
Pismo PowerBook: dual boot

I haven't had as many years using Linux (only 2) as you have. And aside from that my computer experience amounts to a few mid-'80s semesters of VAXen and the entire life of the Mac platform -- and around 4 months of NetBSD and OpenBSD. But I have to say it (adding BSD to the mix) hasn't been that hard at all. There are many similarities with Linux. Much of your current knowledge will transfer. For anyone who has learned guitar and then tried bass, or ukulele, you've experienced this before.

-B...

What you're thinking of is the Mac ROM, which used to be a megabyte or two of low-level code stored in a ROM chip on the mainboard. These were copyrighted by Apple, and were necessary for MacOS to run. This meant that PowerMac cloners had to license the ROM from Apple, and that MacOS emulators and virtual machines (Mac-on-linux, SheepShaver et al) needed a ROM image in order to run.

Since MacOS 8.6 however, the "ROM" actually resides in a system file loaded into memory straight from disk. New Macs being manufactured don't even have a traditional style "MacOS ROM" chip. Programs like MOL boot MacOS just fine using nothing but the ROM file from the install CD.