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2. The kernel source is not available because it's the least complex part of the OS -- it's available partly because it's one of the more complex pieces, and a lot of really smart people who know their stuff in kernel space look at / debug / suggest additions for it.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, why not take advatage of another success.

I love Linux, have used it quite a bit, set-up a few servers here and there, used it as a desktop a bit, on a PPC processor via LinuxPPC and also x86 with Debian. It's functional. It's nice. and It's free. Makes for insanely great bang for the buck on server platforms.

Furthermore, there is a largely symbiotic relationship between the Open-Source Community and Mac OS X. Innovations on each side are typically great benefits to the Community at large.

With all that said, Mac OS X still blows Linux out of the water, hands-down. I'd be happy to elaborate, but i don't think i need to. Feel free to ask me to. And I will, you better believe it.

Firefox lockes up on my aged PB G3 300 w/ X.3.7 (XPostFacto). Absolutely worthless to me on that machine. Had problems as well on an iMac G4 1GHz. Works great on my Win2K box, though.

I think DarwinPorts is working on something like this. Unless I'm mistaken of course...

Dude, check it:

http://www.opendarwin.org/

Binaries for KDE on OS X.

they sure aren't. now what does this have to do with opendarwin?

what software are you talking about? Please check DarwinPorts, Fink and GNU-Darwin to see that actually most GNU-style software runs on OS-X just fine.
Only thing I see at first glance, that OS-X is not conforming to the FHS is, that it mounts external media in /Volumes instead of /media ...

If you're going to pay the premium for a G5, why not enjoy the complete hardware integration and plethora of available software offered by OS X?

One word: GNUStep

Just because nobody has completely implemented the OS X APIs doesn't mean they're not open. Eventually, you may be able to develop an app, GUI and all, on OS X then compile and run it on Linux/BSD/Solaris and *gasp* even Windows.

And if being able to compile all kinds of Unix apps on OS X doesn't make it Unix, I don't now what does.

This may be redundant, but have you looked recently?

• 1.2GHz PowerPC G4
• 512K L2 cache @1.2GHz
• 12-inch TFT Displays
• 1024x768 resolution
• 256MB DDR266 SDRAM
• 30GB Ultra ATA drive
• CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 w/32MB dedicateDDR video memory
• AirPort Extreme built-in
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• 1 IEEE 1394 port
• 1 Video out port (for mirroring*)
• v.92 56k + 10/100 video
• lots of bundled software
• X11 with lots of ported software (Fink, Darwin Ports)

• Cost? $999 Lower if you are a student or developer.

  Build a Dell or HP with those specs, and you will find them priced similarily. You may find the Mac is less expensive.

  * - but there is a hack for dual display
  ps-save the coupld hundred bucks and do not go with the 14" screen. The 12" an 14" have the same resolution (and that bugs me :))

There's Fink (Debian based), Portage and DarwinPorts

Not to mention that the opendarwin 'distro' lags several versions behind the OSX build, i.e.
OS X 10.3.6 = Darwin 7.6
current version of OpenDarwin = 7.2.1

I think you will find that Darwine is exectly what you are describing.

Not to mention the Fink project, which adds tons of great apps to the command line.

Fink is nice, but it tends to make something of a mess. Even worse, that mess is mixed in with your current files, making it difficult to clean up later. I've found that http://packages.opendarwin.org works better. Don't access it through your web browser. just select finder, then click on the "Go" menu, then "Connect to Server...". Place that URL in the textfield and click "OK". You should now have a WebDAV archive of opensource binaries mounted on your desktop.

Have fun!

The above did not mention Darwinports, an excellent alternative to Fink. http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/

I live in the terminal on my ibook. Darwinports provided wget, unison, tin, links, mutt, irssi, anacron, and a ton of other Unix stuff. Of course Macs already come with vim, emacs, and the ability to alias emacs='vim'.

Roll up your sleeves and open that terminal!

I'm just wondering, is there much of a point running Linux on your Mac? I mean, it'd be much better to run Opendarwin with either Darwinports or Fink on top of it. From there you can install KDE or GNOME plus lots of other stuff.

Opendarwin would have much better hardware support than Linux on Macs. Has anybody done this? What's the install like? Is there any way to upgrade to new Opendarwin releases?

I'm just wondering, is there much of a point running Linux on your Mac? I mean, it'd be much better to run Opendarwin with either Darwinports or Fink on top of it. From there you can install KDE or GNOME plus lots of other stuff.

Opendarwin would have much better hardware support than Linux on Macs. Has anybody done this? What's the install like? Is there any way to upgrade to new Opendarwin releases?

They're already working on his for Darwin.

fink? Screw that, darwinports is where it's at!

in fact there is a port of netatalk for Darwin/OS-X already;

My understanding is that IOkit is quite different from Mach or FreeBSD---to the extent that drivers have to be pretty much rewritten from scratch. I also thought (though I'd be happy to be corrected) that the memory subsystem, and in particular the multiprocessor stuff, was mostly Mach. In fact, mostly 'Darwin' by now.

If the 'problematic' bits of FreeBSD 5.x are in the memory, threading and driver sections, then I would not expect those to have much relevance to Darwin, and hence would be no barrier to Darwin adopting the rest of FreeBSD 5.x as much a possible.

I appear, from the above link, to have a little dismissive of the contribution of FreeBSD as 'just' userland.

any mac coder aroud to port tripwire to macos X ?

DarwinPorts already offer a Tripwire port for OS X.

any mac coder aroud to port tripwire to macos X ?

DarwinPorts already offer a Tripwire port for OS X.

Hey, what about these operations?!

Things might change: http://darwine.opendarwin.org/

Google is no replacement for memory

Suddenly I'm like Dick Cheney with URLs

You mean Quartz Extreme. Quartz is to OS X what GDI is to Windows. If you rule out Quartz, you can just use Darwin (which is basically Mac OS X without Quartz). And no, you don't want that.

I am just curious, when was the last time you *actively* used WINE? Because, a couple of years ago, I was running a Red Hat 7.2 box with WINE and was running Microsoft apps very well. I used to have a screenshot of my desktop with IE open looking at microsoft.com while typing something in Word. On top of that, WINE has come a *long* way since then. I understand that you can now run Apple iTunes under Linux using WINE.

Also, it is funny that you should mention that "Windows programs wouldn't work except through something like Wine, which won't work any better for Mac ..." Check out Darwine and you might be surprised. http://darwine.opendarwin.org/ While I will admit that this isn't quite Beta quality, and much work needs to be done, there is something about a screenshot of Notepad running on a PPC Mac under OS X that makes me giddy like a school girl. .... Errr yeah ....

Anyway, the Darwine team isn't even satisfied with merely running Windows binaries. They are even working on a port of the entire SDK so that open source Windows x86 apps can be recompiled completely against Darwine as a more "native" app. Though, the underlying and most important component is a Bochs like x86 HCL emulator. So it isn't like it can automagically fix little to big endian problems. But hey, it's a start.

I can already say "Name me something besides a game app that I can't run on my Mac in an equivalent fashion." Soon we'll be able to say "Name me something I can't run on my Mac, period."

Oh ... and slipping slightly back on topic here, since this is about an x86 Mac OS X port ..... as was already previously stated in another post, OPENStep compiled fat binaries for each arch. it was available on. Look at GNUStep. An open source implimentation of the NeXT SDKs. In fact Linux Journal recently did an entire article on GNUStep, with a complete program .... some kind of image manipulation app .... so that they could go .... "Ok now, change this line and this line of code, recompile and viola instant OS X PPC Native app." Don't think there isn't a version of OS X on x86 hardware *somewhere* ... just know that it's more heavily guarded than anything in the government .... It was widely rumored that x86 development boxes that were welded shut were given out to very select important vendors (Adobe) just before IBM figured out how to get the G5 to be a viable option .... so it was thought about. But if it ever happened it would be *APPLE* x86 hardware, meaning there would be no BIOS so it wouldn't run x86 OS like Windows, it would be Open Firmware and would be designed specific to Apple's requirements .... it would have just happened to have an x86 chip as the CPU

There's DarwinPorts and Gentoo too!

As for linux envy... OS X is a BSD derivative! http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/ and http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_MacOS are some more ports friendly systems, as opposed to Fink's apt-style system. Maybe "Linux curious" would be a better term ;)

Then you would be hacking the OS instead, becaus AFAIK Mac OS is limited to the chips that Apple want to run it on.

In fact, if OS X would check for the presence of approved chips, how the hell would Pear PC be able to boot OS X, except by duplicating the functionality of said chips which would be a) a lot of work b) probably illegal.

To run OS X on a XBox 2, you would basically need the following things:

• Install some kind of bootloader on the XBox2.
• Write Darwin drivers for the XBox2's hardware.
• Somehow build a bootable volume that contains OS X + those drivers.
• Have the bootloader build a device tree and start the Darwin kernel.

Sorry, but there are no drivers for Airport nor Airport Extreme in Darwin. See the OpenDarwin Sources for the available open source.

I would expect OpenDarwin to be prominently linked from this site. That's what I found searching for jhead on MacOS X. Seems like a big project. Am I missing something?

Tiger isn't going to be released until sometime in the first half of 2005, even then it will contain fat binaries which are binaries containing multiple versions of the same executable in different ISAs or what have you. Tiger then will have 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all of its frameworks and the OS will pick which to use at runtime based on what processor the system is running on. This was a capability of OpenStep, fat binaries allowed you to compile for different architectures yet only distribute one executable file without JITC.

After Tiger there isn't likely to be another OSX upgrade until the first half of 2007 or so. So between now and the release of Tiger's successor you've got plenty of time to use a Powerbook. Even when Tiger's successor (Ocelot?) is released it will very likely still support old 32-bit Macs considering there will still be millions of them in use. It was only with Panther's release the Apple dropped official support for the last of the Old World machines, Wallstreet Powerbook and Beige G3 PowerMac, though with a little hacking they work just fine. Those systems were both five years old when Panther was released.

MS needs to just release a version of windows for the mac that can run as a .app if they want to have real compatibility, but then you'd still have to have a VM for the other x86 applications.

I think that this ... is far more interesting ...( and along a similar track to what you are suggesting)

nick ...

I agree, its misleading, and the gtk2/x11 port is butt-ugly, it does work.

For gaim on osx I prefer adiumx [adiumx.com].

QEMU does something similar... it uses a just-in-time-translation approach to emulate different CPUs (currently x86, ARM, SPARC and PowerPC).

For x86-on-x86 emulation, it's only about 4 to 6 times slower than the host CPU.

It can emulate a PC complete with network card, hard drives, graphics, etc. Best of all, it automatically provides a firewall and DHCP server on the emulated network connection, so an operating system running in the emulation can access the "outside" network painlessly.

Apart from emulating complete systems, it's also able to launch binaries compiled for another CPU. In that case it uses dynamic loader tricks to translate library calls to native calls.

I believe the Darwine project plans to use it in conjunction with Wine to run Windows applications on MacOS X.

It's really really cool stuff!

While MacOS X libraries are from FreeBSD, Darwin (the kernel) is Mach derived and has very little to do with the FreeBSD kernel.

That's not true. The FreeBSD network stack is used in Darwin with a compat layer. Look at OpenDarwin's cvsweb for an example.

...with a few linux and *bsd PCs and such...and windows occasionally...
[opinion]
the one button mouse is okay most of the time. Some programs (ie Shake) will require a mouse with more than one button. Those are rare though, and I think you'll quickly learn how to use control+click as a substitute.
The one upside about the one button mouse is that its great for both people who mouse with their right and left hands. Microsoft mice and such rarely are comfortable for the minority of people who are left handed mousers.
[/opinion]
The one huge bizarre difference between OS X and Windows would be the interface. Application windows won't have menu bars for the most part in each window, the three buttons (close/minimize/shrink) are on opposite sides, the dock is a bigger version of those little icons next to the start menu you can click (forgot what those were called), the menu bar could be considered the less customizable Mac equivalent.
Icons are on the opposite side of the screen (along the right, not the left) generally unless you move the icons, and windows-only wallpaper will be useless.
On the flip side, I find that the Mac community (sans the n00bs) is absolutely wonderful to go to help for, but just make sure to google first. Mac developers and programs for the Mac are absolutely gorgeous. Once in a while you'll come across something that won't quite be the same, like FCP or Blender, but thats rare.
There's also the BSD foundation, which is quite handy. If you're used to working with *BSD or Linux, you'll feel right at home. for development theres the free xcode tools, gcc, et cetera. if you want, there's also gentoo for mac os x (basically just portage), darwinports, and fink to make your life easier
It'll probably take around a week or so to get used to it. But after you switch, you'll wish you could use it all the time (: Good luck, and nice machine.

All of these let you move your mouse off the side of a screen on the machine running the program, over to another machine.

osx2x - control another machine via X11 or VNC, from a Mac.

x2x (check your OS' package collection) - control another machine via X11, from an X11 host.

x2vnc (again, check for packages) - control another machien via VNC, from an X11 host.

win2vnc - control another machine via VNC, from a Windows host.

Windows/OS X cannot adopt such a system because of the commercial context.

According to their FAQ they are integrating a binary translator called QEMU. Their intention seems to be to have the wine libraries native and have them talk to the windows app (still x86) through qemu. This sounds like an interesting idea, especially if their additions to wine and qemu are integrated into the main trees. Then linux on other architectures could likely take advantage (if qemu has been/is ported to that architecture).

From the website: "We are currently working on integrating an x86 emulator in wine in order to run Win32 exe on a PowerPC Box. But on Darwin-x86 a Win32 .exe should run within wine" http://darwine.opendarwin.org/faq.php#5

So yeah it will involve an emulator on PPC but remember that Darwin is also on x86. So WINE will still be NE but will be used in conjunction with something that IE (is an emulator). :-)

If it were licensed under BSD, then companies such as MS, Apple, etc. could take the kernel, use it, change it or whatever w/o showing the changes... just like Apple has done with much of the FreeBSD code.

If it were licensed under BSD, then companies such as MS, Apple, etc. could take the kernel, use it, change it or whatever w/o showing the changes... just like Apple has done with much of the FreeBSD code.

Not trying to be negative, but is the base system & kernel open sourced from Apple or didn't Apple take somebody else's work and lock it down? In other words I have the understanding that Apple took FreeBSD which is somebodyelses hard work and added their own stuff on top without releasing the stuff on top or how it interacts with the stuff provided by FreeBSD, or any changes they might have made to FreeBSD to make it better.

Apple bought a company called NeXT that had a proprietary BSD386 based OS running on the Mach Micro-Kernal. In the company was an employee who had done a large amount of the original work creating the Mach Micro-kernal. Apple took the NeXTStep / OpenStep operating system as the basis for its Mac OS X operating system. Apple ported it to the PowerPC Chip sets, fused it with knowledge gained from Apple's earlier Unix OSes A/UX and MkLinux and then re-synced the userland with FreeBSD 4.x (now they sync the userland to FreeBSD 5.x).

This might need more explaining. Unlike Linux where all each distribution has the same Linix kernal (sometimes compiled in different ways, but still the same kernal code), BSD branches do NOT have the same kernal. NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and Darwin(Mac OS X) are each different kernal code bases. Sometimes they share components / code, but mostly they do not. The different branches are designed to provide the same working userland to users and applications. By "re-synced the userland to FreeBSD" Apple did little more then confirm their OS is compatible with FreeBSD and either updated their own /bin and/usr/bin applications to feature / function compatibility with FreeBSD or ported the FreeBSD apps over, whichever made the most sense. Again all work was done by Apple Engineers.

So what Apple did was not "take somebody else's work and lock it down" but rather take the work Apple Engineers and the Engineers of a second company Apple bought (and retained the employees of) and release the code for no cost onto the internet.

OpenDarwin.org

While this is certainly valid given the license of FreeBSD, strictly speaking that's just being a thief as far as I'm concerned.(Yes I know MS has done this too with it's Unix Services layer).

If someone gives something to you for free, it is not stealing. The only people who are allowed a moral objection to how you use the freely given object are the ones who gave it to you. Far from being upset at it, BSD users "shouted for joy" that Apple choose to base their new OS on BSD. Daemon News: Apple -- What's in it for BSD?

I also understand however, that Apple has given some changes back to the KDE community for the web browser, locking up other changes however behind a proprietary license. In other words it looks to me like Apple is trying to garner some favor while stealing the "open source" community blind.

Every single piece of OpenSource software Apple has used (irrespective of the license it was released under and the requirement, or NOT, to release the code) they have release the code to. The code is available either through the Darwin OS , one of the other Apple Open Source Projects, or by giving the code back to the original developers. In addition to that Apple has also released code that was never before opensource, with projects such as OpenPlay , Darwin Streaming Server and

Does anyone /yet/ KNOW why Darwin 6 (and OS X 10.2) don't work on the 604e?

This guy didn't figure it out: http://www.opendarwin.org/pipermail/hackers/2003-J anuary/003730.html

Darwin's source code is freely available, as is a derivative of that code, OpenDarwin.

This could change now that Microsoft owns Virtual PC, M$ could:

• Accelerate DirectX via OpenGL(but still leave out Windows OpenGL support)
• rewrite or just recompile a bunch of DLLs so they run natively (like DarWine)