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First off, just to clear this up...
soon to get easier with the X11 on Max OS X

X has been on X for quite some time. You could fink it if you wanted, or, if you want something even easier, you could XonX it or xdarwin it.

What's new, of course, is Apple's X11. That Apple would Aquafy X11 is really a great step forward, and hopefully means that -- and this is key -- Apple will start shipping Macs with X11 preinstalled.

Just as OS X's built in Java Virtual Machine makes OS X a first-rate Java deployment platform as Java apps look and act native without a single end user consideration about VMs, soon OS X could be a first-rate, well-integrated client-side deployment platform for open source software. Most importantly, this will continue to add new developers to open source movements, and that can't be bad. Even if Apple doesn't share everything they do, the fact that you'll have people used to making client-side apps increasingly contributing to open source projects is a great thing.

Not to mention that I've been impressed with what Apple's give back to the oss community, even though they technically often have no reason at all to do so. They've made Darwin open source, and have worked with the BSDs to share code that they have no pressing legal reason making them do so. Safari's updates to KHTML continue to be checked back in to the Konquerer source code by this paid Apple employee, which is another great move.

The only way I see Apple's new love of oss possibly being a bad thing is that Apple tends to hire the best away from open source projects and slap them onto Apple-first ones. Though this is great in that these people feel connected to the oss community, it has to shift their attention away from Linux and other F/free *NIXes a bit.

But more developers, especially good client-app developers, is a good thing, and having Apple return their contributions to the community is icing on the cake.

I absolutely agree with you. Mac OS 9 has ascetic but very efficient GUI. Aqua is just a toy, with too many annoying features like the Genie/Scale Effect.
But who am I to say these things? After all I think KDE and GNOME are all I need.
I'm happily running rootless X11 with GNOME on top of Aqua.

yes; you can install X Windows on OS X, and put whatever WM you like on it instead of the delicious huggable Aqua.

X11 on Mac OS X is a not an issue. You can find X11 for Mac OS X here. Any halfway competent *NIX user can find and install it without any problems. Or you could install fink and just apt-get install it.

Pay no attention to the square brackets - slashcode thinks every http server has a three part name (some have more).

You'll also need XDarwin, of course, which should be installed before you install OroborosX.

First, there's the XonX project, where they've developed a way to run rootless XFree86. It's kind of a pain to get working, so you need:

XDarwin, which is a nice way to get XFree86 windows run next to MacOSX's Aqua windows. However, even this has its faults, so I highly recommend:

OroborOSX, which is an X11 window manager/environment. I've been running 0.75a3 and a4 for a little while now, and it's pretty good. I haven't successfully compiled any X applications for it, but I haven't had much time over Christmas break to work seriously on it.

If you're looking for UNIX software to run on Mac OS X, try Fink, which aims to port all sorts of UNIX software to OS X. There's also the GNU Mac OS X Public Archive, which I only just found, and some Mac OS X ports on Forked.net, which I used to solve some initial XDarwin issues I was having.

Anyway, Microsoft wouldn't be able to port Office for OS X to UNIX very easily, we can move UNIX software (and even X11 software) to Mac OS X without too much difficulty.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -Ghandi

Lots of misinformation attached to this article. Quartz will display anything sent to it by a client application. The usual clients are Aqua applications and the Aqua window manager, but XFree86 can act as a Quartz client as well. That's how rootless X11 on Mac OS X is done. See the XonX project page for more on this.

I still have trouble if I lose a connection to a remote X machine, or if I kill XDarwin. In that case, I seem to have trouble starting a new X session, it complains that it cannot connect to a socket and that another XDarwin might be running.

Well, you could install XFree on Mac OS X and replace the loginpanel with KDE's (a small hack in /etc/ttys). The result would be a KDE system with a great hardware support and optional Mac OS-compatibility (when you launch the window server).

A lot of people are saying "it depends," but I'm not really sure why. Just about any UNIX app that will compile on *BSD (graphical or not) can run on OS X. Get XonX and you can run a rootless XFree86 port right next to the Aqua windows. Where does "it depends" even enter this? OS X is as much a UNIX as FreeBSD and Linux are, period.

The funny thing I've found however, is that after going to great lengths to install beta versions of XDarwin and hacking libraries to get them to compile (this was 6 months ago, all of this is much easier now), I found myself wondering what exactly to do with it. I put a lot of importance on running my old Linux apps, but when it came down to it there was nothing I needed to run under X! I used the Gimp for a bit, but then picked up a copy of Photoshop instead; Mozilla runs better under Aqua than X-Windows; Fire is a great ICQ client and I really like Apple's Mail.app for email; Microsoft Office for the Mac is hands down better than any UNIX clone (or even Office for Windows). The new Office for X looks phenomenal! Everybody using OS X should download the Word for X trial version and try it for themselves. StarOffice and the like don't even come close to this newest version of Word for the Mac. Amazing.

Sometimes I use the xterms in XDarwin just for old times sake, and it's nice to remotely connect to my linux box though the X Server, but what really struck me is how much better apps are in OS X than they are in Linux. Sure a lot of these apps aren't free, but I was never using them because they were free: I was using them because they got the job done well. Now I'm using no X-Windows apps, a handful of OS 9 apps, but the vast majority of the apps I use are OS X native. It's official, I'm a Mac convert :).

- j

The short answer is yes: OS X is a Unix variant - so you only need to recompile the software. In fact many tools of OS X are typical Unix programs, apache, perl, gcc, tcsh, etc...

The long answer is, it depends. While OS X is clearly Unix, there are some issues:

• OS X is from the BDS Unix familly, so linux programs might need some tweaking.
• OS X is structured differently from other Unixes, standart paths are different and configuration files are very different.
• Most Unix system use the X11 standart for GUI. OS X does not use X11 but instead a protocol based on display PDF. While it is possible to install an X11 server (for instance Xfree), this is not the default installation.

• Loads of ported UNIX software thanks to the FreeBSD ports tree
• A free X server now with rootless support!
• Ass loads of Mac software on top of that

Basically, you can't get a cheaper laptop that will ship with a top notch UNIX system pre-installed. Sure you could get a PC laptop and dual boot windows and whatever, but why bother?

The iBook is very durable. I threw mine in a pillow case, then put that in my backpack so I could skateboard to school every day and it has withstood all the abuse I have given it.

It's great on the network. If the built in modem, 10/100 ethernet isn't good enough for you, you can have wireless for another 100 bucks. It's industry standard, too so you can fit in just fine on a PC network (did I mention that OS 10.1 will ship with SAMBA?) The networking code is all BSD goodness. It can't get any better than that.

Aqua is also the best GUI I have ever used. I grew up on windows, and used WindowMaker, blackbox, and enlightnement for X. Aqua blows them all away.

The only reason not to buy one is if you can't stand Apple computers or Steve Jobs for some reason. For me, I purchase computers based on technical merit, not based on petty biases, so the iBook was a great choice for me.

They are working on rootless X, but I believe it's still in the testing phase.

Correct. As has already been mentioned, rootless support is in the current development versions of XFree86, available from CVS. There are still lots of bugs to sort out, but it's coming along nicely. A first binary test release will be out soon. Watch the web site mentioned below.

There are a lot of gimp people looking into rootless heavily over at Mac Gimp

The people behind MacGimp actually are not participating in the development of Xfree86. They just post news about it and sell it on CDs. Rootless mode is developed mainly by Gregory Parker. More information on the development of XFree86 for Darwin and Mac OS X can be found at http://www.mrcla.com/XonX/.

In my configuration, mouse3 (right button) is bound to the enter key just right of the spacebar. My mouse2 (middle button) is bound to F11.

Would be nice to have buttons 1, 2, 3 emulated by (command-)click, option-click, control-click (...thus allowing combinations) -- a bit as happens in OS X if you use XonX / XDarwin.

Has anyone managed that in Linux?

I've heard about rootless X on OS X, but I have no idea where to find it! Any leads on where I can find it?

Try the XFree86 on Darwin and Mac OS X page. Most of the work is done through the XonX project at Sourceforge. I believe that in order to get the rootless X in Aqua working, you need to build the latest XFree86 and XonX from CVS. Check the archives of the Darwin Development mailing list at darwinfo.org for postings by Torrey Lyons on how to compile it.

In fact some of the more fanatic anti-KDE crowd may have a point in continuously bringing up Qt's licensing issues (although the real pain is past now, with Qt/Linux being GPL).

Except what you call "Qt/Linux" will (with trivial tweaking) compile and run on Windows, thanks to Cygwin XFree86 (think DirectX11), which has recently been patched to run properly on Windows 9x and ME (which are not as 32-bit clean as Microsoft would have you think).

How does this work? Qt Free Edition is intended to run on any POSIX environment with an X11 server. Cygwin creates a POSIX conforming environment with a complete GNU userland inside Win32; Cygwin/XFree86 handles requests from Xlib clients and calls GDI and DirectX on their behalf.

Of course, Mac OS X can run X11 programs too.

OS X is open source. look at it all you want.

Darwin, the kernel of Mac OS X, is almost-free software. The theme editor lies squarely in Apple's proprietary domain (Quartz/Aqua/Carbon technologies). If you want themes on Mac OS X, run GNOME or KDE with XFree86.

it's kinda sketchy on hardware support right now, but i have it running on a celery 333 (overclocked to 375, behold my speed!!!)

looks alot like *BSD, nothing super special.

got a 3com card that's not supported yet, going to try to fix that, then it's on to cramming X on X on dis mofo.

X on X

I've compiled and installed a number of X-Windows things for OS X, including glib, gtk+, imlib, jpeglib, etc., XEmacs, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Xfce, XV, rxvt, Freeciv, Dillo, gFTP, and Postilion. (To start X-Windows, you need to type ">console" at the login window; login to the console, type startx, and away you go.) Apple added a number of symbolic links at places other flavors of *NIX usually have their system libraries; the links point to the location of said libs in Apple's distribution. Hence you no longer need to hack the hell out of the configures and makefiles to get things to compile. In fact most things just require a simple ./configure, make, make install, without any modifiction aside from occasionally needing to specify --host=powerpc-apple-darwin1.3 or --host=powerpc-apple-machten.

Go to gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net or fink.sourceforge.net for more information on getting X to run under OS X. For that matter, if anyone's interested in running X without having to shutdown OS X's native window manager first, check out the XonX project at mrcla.com/XonX/.

You can run the VNC Server and view the X environment in a window, exit the GUI to the command line and startx, or run X-Tools

A free version of XFree86 running side by side with Mac OS X's Aqua GUI is now here! Gregory Robert Parker did the original implementation of this for the Darwin port of XFree86 4.0. I have incorporated his code into XFree86 4.0.2 and cleaned it up a bit. It is still in rough form, but it works and is reasonably fast. This code will eventually find its way into the XFree86 CVS repository, but for now it is available here.

Before you launch the X server from Mac OS X, you must make sure that your startup script is correct. If you have an .xserverrc file, make sure it specifies the option "-quartz", which directs the X server to run in parallel with the CoreGraphics window server. To start the X server, launch the Xmaster application. You will see the screen flash and then you will be returned to the Aqua GUI. Clicking on the big button with a small "X" in it will switch you to the X window desktop. Holding down Command-Option-Control-Shift-A will switch you back to the Aqua GUI. Have fun!

If you keep reading through this conversation, you'll eventually come across several instances of this link.

XFree86 on Darwin and OS X