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Why Port from UNIX to OS X?
mblase asks: "According to a recent MacCentral article, one of the benefits of Mac OS X's NeXT-based roots is that "since Mac OS X is BSD based, the ports shouldn't be too difficult. The hardest part, according to Robert Palmer, will be writing the GUI (graphical user interface) front end to make administration easy." My question is, is this likely to happen? Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system that costs more in hardware and OS software both? Or is the demand likely to come from the other direction -- OS X server admins who want the stability and popularity of established UNIX applications, even if the graphical front-end Mac users have come to expect may be less than ideal? This will doubtless be a big issue for Apple as they tout Mac OS X as a server platform for the future."
nik says: How about "larger installed userbase"? Assume Linux has ~ 7 million users, and the BSD's have about 3 million (both those numbers are on the conservative side). Apple's probably going to ship 10 million or more OS X boxes in the next year or so, and porting most software is going to be no-brainer (particularly if it's already in the Free, Net, and Open BSD ports and packages collections).
first - i think they've announced that server and "consumer" versions won't be seperate after they actually release the consumer version. second - there was a port of X announced the other day... so why would you really _need_ to redo the UI? as long as it runs, it runs. if a whole lot of people like it after you recompile it, then worry about the front end. possibly a better idea is to port QT or the GTK?
Sitting Walrus Blog
iMac: ~$799
Cheapest new Sun workstation: ~$2000
Draw your own conclutions. The Macintosh will be the cheapest and most available system ever to come with a UNIX preloaded. No other UNIX-like platform alone will match the cost and installed base of the Macintosh. Port? You betcha. Why do so many people port to NT? Porting to OS X is even easier than porting to NT. Win for Apple.
The point of MacOS X is to have the robustness of Unix (vs. the older primitive floppy-based kernel) with the "user friendliness" of the Mac. Sounds like a good deal to me, if you're looking to attract the types of people who favor Macs (and who by inference generally wouldn't be comfortable in a classical Unix environment).
Like the article says, what would the advantage be for porting it to OSX...The only one I can think of is the availability of some Macs...I know at my old job, we had a ton of macs that were useless because they did not have the software on them that was needed...I could see putting Unix on it and then having use for them again and saving a little money.
"The hardest part, according to Robert Palmer, will be writing the GUI..."
This is old news. Haven't you ever heard his song? "Simply Unportable"
As for "assume Linux has 7 million users"--there are more than that. That figure comes from a survey done 3-4 years ago. The other conclusion of that study was that the numbers were doubling every year. Even assuming it's still "only" doubling that puts us at 54-108 million.
That number seems a little high to me, but that's just a gut reaction. Don't bother responding with YOUR gut reactions--get some hard facts (or at least hard reasoning).
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Who will do the porting depends on who is doing the developing. Commercial developers seek users for their software, they will be more likely to be the ones porting their product to the OSX platform, in order to increase market share, gain users, so forth. Open Source Software, however, is the development of software in order to fill a need, it is open sourced to share with the world. People who want OSS on their system typically do the ports themselves. The developers of the software generally aren't looking for more users, it is users looking for the software, and hence they usually do the porting. There are of course, projects such as NetBSD, who really want to run on every platform in existence from supercomputers to gameboys. Overwhelmingly, who ports the software will depend on who owns it, why it is being ported, and who wants it.
Eh...
Last I heard, Apple was still planning to include some sort of command line interface for "Advanced Users" if they wanted to install it. How hard would it be to set up an option in the installer for "command line only"? They already have Darwin, which is command-line only, so apparently it's possible to separate the Aqua prettiness from the command line. I think if they offered this option it would please a lot of the server admins out there and would increase OSX's viability as a server platform.
-colin
-Colin
I as a Solaris Admin and a BSD fan. I wholeheartedly am gonna be jumping on the Macintosh bandwagon. I love the idea of a creamy outside with the crunchy inards. The GUI's have always sucked in UNIX but have been stable. I have always just used a terminal windows for the most part for a CLI anyway. I think it's a great combo personally and love the immense power of the G4's. I wish I had come up with the idea myself... But anyhow, I plan on supporting it and doing my share of development and porting.
It's not really interesting to port "Unix apps" - in the sense of command-line sysadmin software - to OSX. (Mac-based servers will probably be running OSX Server, which resembles NeXT even more and, when you get down to it, is a full-fledged *nix in all but the name. Porting to it should be trivial.)
:)
What's really interesting to port is what we more often think of as "Linux apps" - stuff that you usually run under Gnome or KDE. Galeon is a good example, as are Gnumeric and LyX. This is graphical end-user level software. There is really no good reason not to port it to OSX; in fact, I plan to do some porting myself once it's released. The only significant obstacle I can think of is the graphics toolkit; with that in mind, I think it'd be interesting to begin a project to provide compatibility layers for all the common graphics toolkits - GTK, Qt, Tk (as in Tcl/ or Perl/), and so on - under OSX. Having that, porting your average "Linux program" to the new system would be almost trivial. The programmers in charge would have a much-expanded user base; and the users would be able to run just about anything that shows up on Freshmeat.net. Everybody's happy
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
There will be two camps of OSX users. Some GUI only mac faithful, and some more sophisticated users like developers, service deployers and "power users". The latter camp will benefit from shell based, unix command line tools, without any further UI work. These tools should port for almost no work. Then there can be a lot of convergence work between the OSX community and the Unix community, where experienced cocoa developers can build Cocoa front ends to unix originated tools/libraries. The combined results will not flow back to Unix, but live exclusively in the OSX world. In fact, this situation already exists with OpenStep/YellowBox. One (of many) example is CVL, a Cocoa front end to cvs (http://www.sente.ch/software/cvl/).
Sometimes moving among the various flavors of unix is as simple as typing make. For developers, it's not a question of "why", but of "why not?". If a sizable market is suddenly opened up with relatively little code modification (compared to porting to NT) then it's good business sense.
I don't really know what sort of terminal emulation/command-line thingie (vt100.App ?) OS-X is going to ship with. If its not available, the 99.999% of OS-X programs are going to use a NeXTStep-like, window based eventing model; which would be VERY hard to port to a NOT Next-like environment. The other way is true also. HOWEVER, I suspect that text programs will be accessible, the implication here is that Linux/BSD/etc programs (character based + daemons) should compile relatively easy. But do Mac Guys write this sort of program ?? Not in my experience. It really seems like the porting flow would be from Un*x to OS-X, not the other way around. Unless of course, someone ports Display PDF/Aqua/etc to Un*x ;)
Just my $0.02
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
You had refined your trolling so far it was indistingiushable from real posts. But you've apparently lost it in the past few days.
For instance, why compare iMac to Sun? SCO, BSD AND Linux all run on Intel. You can get an Intel box for the same price as an iMac and we all know the OS is free....
Probably the "cheapest and most available system ever to come with a UNIX preloaded" so far is the DotStation from Intel (IBM?) that comes with Linux. I doubt iMac with OS X (will OS X run on an iMac) can beat it.
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Since when does Unix have lower hardware and software costs than Mac OS?
Free operating systems != Unix. When you say Unix, I start thinking of Solaris, AT&T, SCO, Irix, and so on. Hardware and software costs are much higher in that world. If you mean that free Unix and Unix-like operating systems have lower hardware and software costs than MacOS, then that has pretty much always been true and pretty much always will be. No commercial enterprise can hope to compete with free software for dollar value.
Undoubtedly, there will be some push in both directions, development-wise. Many current OS X developers are companies that built NeXTStep applications or have Mac/Unix products, like Tenon. Mac OS X is already a respectable server platform precisely because it runs unadulterated Apache, among other things. For server applications, the OS X's BSD heritage is a clear selling point, and OS X is already a pretty good BSD flavor.
For the near future, end-user applications will primarily run in the classic Mac OS compatibility environment, until more are converted to use CarbonLib (which is happening already). Most of the work being done in the better Cocoa API is by NeXTStep developers; mainstream Mac developers will probably not move on to Cocoa until they've successfully Carbonized their current applications.
It's going to be a bumpy ride, but hopefully the end result will be worth it. Mac people have been waiting for a real OS that would handle their beloved GUI for years. With Mac OS X, it could finally come to fruition.
Look at it from an industry standpoint: If you a head of a corporation than ran a mixed environment (mixed being basically all the major platforms), would you want to purchase a program that can only run on some of the machines, or one that is available for all of the machines?
Portability helps break down the software barrier. Face it: Most of the cost of machines is not hardware, its software. If developers could write programs that are easily portable (as in the case with Unix and OS X), then software cost eventually would drop (you would be doing less programming for more platforms).
I know not all of this is possible, but it would be nice for corporations to be able to spend more on their employees instead of the software we need.
MunITioN
MunITioN
"A mind is a terrible thing to lose"
No. Apple has a lot more than 3% of the market. They have 3% of the business market. As a whole, they have nearly 10%. Apple sold, last I heard, over 1 million PCs world wide last year. IF what you say is true, than the rest of the world bought 33.3 million PCs? I don't think so
I am Slad.
If the major stumbling block is reconnecting the GUI, I for one would prefer the excessively-candied Aqua over X anyday. (Something about X's aesthetics just bothers me... =)
MacOS X definitely represents an opportunity for UNIX vendors to gain access to an even larger base of users. And this could work both ways, with programs developed for the Mac being ported to UNIX platforms.
At Siggraph, there have already been some statements (albeit lukewarm) about porting high-end graphics applications to OS X.
If one uses UFS (instead of HFS+) and installs one of the many available (or soon to be available) X11 servers, he/she will wind up with a full-blown kick your ass Unix. So the port won't be any more difficult than any other port.
There's always an idiosyncratic difference here or there betweeen (Li/U)n(i/u)xes, but thats it.
As to the question of why? Many many mac power users are quite versed with Unix and use a mac in addition to Unix because in their opinion all of the available Unix desktop environments suck.
My opinion is as follows: CDE sucks, Gnome sucks at the moment, KDE sucks at the moment, OpenWindows Desktop sucks slightly less that the rest. Hopefully Gnome and KDE will improve, but that is a different discussion.
Maybe if you compare to x86 hardware (i.e. Emachines). You can pick up a used Imac or a g3 tower for well under $1000, and the G4's are only a couple of grand and outperform x86 hardware in most respects. They're still cheaper than a comparable Sun machine.
Apple has done something really cool... Built a decent server platform that can be administered by total morons. Previously, the only way for idiots to be able to administer a server was to get themselves a copy of NT, and that's not even a decent OS. They're going to make a killing with OSX, and they're going to sell a ton of machines also, especially with the dual G4 machines. How many times have you heard of people going with NT because Unix was hard?
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It is certainly well and good that the "plumbing down below the GUI" looks like BSD, as that represents a well-understood and well-regarded set of "plumbing." That means that you get easy ports of "server side" stuff like Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl, Python, and such.
But with Apple having had some difficulty deciding what their GUI strategy would become, it's going to be a bit problematic to just plain choose a GUI. Do you go with:
Oops. No longer available.
Oops. No longer available.
The really critical thing about all of these options are that none of them, save, perhaps for OpenSTEP, via GNUstep , has any ability to run on any of the existing Unix-like systems.
In effect, in order to use existing Unix apps in GUIed manner on MacOS-X, you need to create a GUI from scratch and layer that on top somehow.
That may be nicely supportive of "web-oriented" applications; I'm sure WebObjects will work nicely on OS-X, as will the sysadmin tool WebMin, and so long as you've got a good web browser, that can provide a way of doing a bunch of useful things.
But that does not provide you with a port of the latest Sid Meier game, nor does it provide a way of running the latest SAP GUI.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Under the CLI side, there's the GNU stuff; Emacs, bison, flex, gcc, patch, etc. Most of those should port trivially, if Apple hasn't already provided them with all the Darwin stuff/hype.
So that should be an almost perfect situation, with very little source mod and no GUI...
I might have heard a rumor that Apple had created a development harness/framework/GUI around those tools, in which case people would love to port this out of Apple, if that could be done trivially. Even if it wasn't trivial!
Then there's the other stuff; SSHes, vi's,Apache, SOCKs stuff, that should also be fairly trivial to port since most of them exist in the BSD universe already and are all CLI anyway, again, if Apple hasn't already had them ported for their own use!
Graphical stuff? What, XEyes? XClock? XEarth? Bah. No comment.
Mozilla, Quake3Arena, etc should not be a problem.
What needs to be worried about?
Bye!
GPL Deconstructed
OK, I'm not a super-coder but from my own understanding (and a slashdot article earlier thatn addressed these issues) I'd like to point out that it's a very unfair assumption to claim that GUI porting is easy.
/. article suggested (or at least the comments did) that if M$ released IE for OSX that IE could be ported to X. Not quite.
The earlier
In order to port over a GUI application, you first need to port the graphics libraries and other libraries, which more than likely aren't going to be Open under OSX (correct me if I'm wrong).
If it can be done, I question what software is going to get to OSX. Most good software, IMHO, already has a *nux port (or was designed for Linux *grin*), or has at least planned on porting it. Sadly, it's been my experience that a lot of people (especially the suits I work with) are loath to give up Winblows because of IE, Office, and other memory-hoggin' applications. If it turns out apps can be ported from OSX to *nix rather easily, then my bet is on M$ not writing any software for OSX.
IMHO, this is the exact same reason M$ doesn't make a Linux distro; to do so would require them to open a least a bit of their code, and M$ is scared shitless of the opensource community being able to run their programs/derivatives without paying ungodly liscence fees.
I think the best alternative is not porting over software that companies won't release themselves; rather, we need to let people know we have something better. Porting M$ software and other software that snubs the *nix world does us no favor; it simply tells these companies that their product is so "good" we need it and will port it ourselves. And hell, if the company doesn't like it they can always file charges.
While I admit it would be nice to be able to run every game than runs on a Mac (not sure on the OSX gaming specs) I think we should move towards developing programs designed to run on *nix, not porting over from other OS's. As we continue to grow, companies with enough sense will put out *nix ports. If not, their loss.
Peace,
DranoK
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If, on the other hand, you want people to actually use your product, then you should stick to the user interface guidelines that Apple publishes. If you don't, nobody will be angry, but they will simply avoid your software. It's how things work in the Mac world; programs with interfaces that are even slightly weird get shunned.
I miss being a Mac user. :(
--josh
One of these days/I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
A more realistic comparison would be:
~$800 imac
~$400 comparable Linux-capable intel box
Draw your own conclusions!
When did Robert Palmer become a developer?
(I'll bet he sits at his keyboard, and has like 10 identical female dancers dancing in sync behind him while he's writing code.)
Hmmm, That would actually be kinda cool.
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This also might have the highly desirable side effect of forcing some folks writing unix software take Apple's lead on user interface issues. Since Apple is generally considered one of the best at user interfaces, perhaps some of it will rub off. :-)
I thought I saw a reference earlier this week to a company that is bringing out an X server... so in theory one could just use X on OS X (man is that gonna get confusing, worse than the client/server naming in X :)).
Personally I can't wait. I love working on my Mac but you can't beat Unix for flexibility. Now we get both integrated.
My main concern though is getting PPC compiled binaries. For example, CMU Common Lisp does not have a PPC version. Maybe this is just because it is a compiler issue - but do Oracle have plans to release Oracle 8 i for the PPC platform ?
Winton
>installer for "command line only"?
Well, it's not an option in the installer, but in the developer preview versions of OS X, you can kill -9 all of the Aqua gooiness and be left with a big honkin fullscreen tcsh shell.
I don't see how they could take that ability away in the final version unless they deny their customers the root login, keeping it for service techs only or something. From what I can tell by using DP4, it does NOT appear that that is in the cards. You have to su (well, a graphical equivelent) from user to root whenever you want to change important system settings. They've put a good deal of work into making su functionality as transparant as possible. Denyng root NOW would mean throwing away a good deal of work already done.
Plus, I imagine that if they *DID* deny the buyer the root login:
1) They would be pubicly roasted alive by nearly everyone... a PR nightmare to say the least.
and
2) It would be cracked soon enough anyway, so there'd really be no point
So it's not bloody likely that Apple would deny OS X buyers root on their own boxen. So I say just modify rc.d to your hearts content.
john
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The problems you address here are "why can't mac apps be ported to (Li/U)n(u/i)x?" And you are right, the gui is the big problem.
However, the question posed is quite different. How easy is it to port existing Unix apps to MacOSX? The answer is: easy because of the existing BSD API and the x11/Motif/Less-tif libs that have already been ported to the platform in both Open-source and commercial environs.
However I think the question pose is an interesting one. I think a great project for the open source community would be to port clones of Quartz and Cocoa to (Li/U)n(u/i)xes.
Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system that costs more in hardware and OS software both?
Consider it this way...
Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system where consumers are accustomed to paying for software?
If a developer can invest a month in OS X porting and produce a saleable product, that can go along way to funding their application development.
Seen that iCube or whatever they call it? flashy buggers. The double-headed G4s are pretty good too.
Anyway, point is, you can get one for $6.2 k that substantially out-specs our university mainframe (although it might have some sort of nuclear-powered disk stuff, RAID or summat, vs the G4's Ultra160 SCSI). 6.2 isn't that much cash, really.
The real question, of course, is how it stacks up against PC hardware. Something comparable from Dell costs 6.7 ... that's 2x450 G4 vs 2x733 PIIIX., the rest is identical (more or less). I'm not up on G4 vs PIIIX, but it seems like PC hardware isn't substantially cheaper, and a Mac is ginuwine RISC hardware.
My real hope is that an official UNIX on a Mac will help the PowerPC linux community produce something a bit more wonderful.
I haven't done any Aqua GUI programming with Cocoa, but it hear it's nice, even easy. A good article on this was at MacWeek a couple weeks ago:
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/07/09/0710movesev
The hardware costs more? That is plainly incorrect. Show me an equally performing PC comparable to a $1799 G4 cube. Show me a decent Sparc that costs less than $2000. Tell me that x86 is a platform where you can pay little money and count on the quality of the components.
You can't. I run a server on a 68060 because x86 hardware is so damned problematic. Aside from moving my server, it's been up continuously since December without a problem.
I can't wait to move to PPC based servers; however, NetBSD for PowerMac is not quite mature yet, and Mac OS X is not ready yet. But come January, I'll have no problem shelling out some cash for Mac OS X.
This is the best of all worlds: The Mac OS GUI (the best in the world), on top of a real Unix core (BSD on Mach), on top of clean hardware (PPC is much prettier than x86, and Apple makes good quality computers).
If people still want to argue that x86 might be better than Mac OS X on PPC, then I just need to say that I believe in quality and elegance over all else; what does one's choice of x86 hardware say about his or her beliefs? Who would you want to host with?
As Win NT has made no significant inroads in the web serving business, it is clear that people and companies are sometimes smart enough to decide to not believe the FUD when the difference in quality is clear. Servers need uptime, not NT.
Therefore, I firmly embrace Mac OS X, and I think when, and not if, is what matters. People who require the Mac GUI for things like Photoshop will use it; people who require X will use MachTen's software, or Xfree will be ported promptly.
The real issue, then, should be whether the Mac GUI will be availabler for other unix platforms, or if people are going to need to write for two GUI APIs, or if people are going to stick with X and run MachTen's X Window or port Xfree...
John Klos
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TGL
--- this space intentionally left blank.
These current "figures" that IDC and other "market research" companies put together are based on every sale from CompRipoff to Joe Bob's Custom Computer Warehouse. Anyone can start a company slapping together Wintel or Linux boxes. Just 1 company sells Macs: Apple. Let's see Dell's or Gateway's market share. Or Compaq, HP, etc. Compare THEM to the rest of the market.
Last I heard, there are over 40 million Macs still out there.... Many of them pre-PowerPC. Add all those into the current sales, and MacOS owns approximately 15% of the market.
---
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I really don't think the stability of unices is thanks to the apps. Unices are built so that an app can't screw up the system, but I don't think I can say I've noticed unix apps are more stable or less stable than windows/mac apps.
MacOS X should ship for $100, and will run on at least all Macs with a G3 or G4 chip. There was 3.7 millions iMacs sold in the past two years. Probably quite a bit of Powerbook and PowerMac G3/G4.
/. you will see that Mac developpers make plenty of cash. It has a large userbase that is loyal and pay for its softwares.
:)
The dual G4/450 box for $2500 is pretty sweet too.
Now if you refer to the two or three discussions about Mac developpement in the past on
So, why wouldn't unix developpers tap into that market?
The UI part wouldn't even be that bad, for X-windows apps, you have a couple of X-windows clients/servers for MacOS (8/8 or X).
Last but not least, I wouldn't be surprised if some unix fox switched to MacOS X. After all, it's unix, the core (Mach kernel, BSD libs) is open source, the hardware is robust (if somewhat proprietary... but then the components are probably more standards than the ones on a SUN box), the GUI niiiice, and it should be plug & play. And access to all the Mac software (including games), if I'm not mistaken there might be more non-server/dev apps for the MacOS than most flavors of unix.
Oh yeah, and no need to dual boot to play games
Just some thoughts.
Janus
Let's see Dell's or Gateway's market share. Or Compaq, HP, etc. Compare THEM to the rest of the market.
That would almost be a valid argument if you couldn't run the same software on a Compaq as a HP as a Gateway. But you can. If you buy an Apple, your effectively stuck with stuff that runs on MacOS. (With a few nitpicky exceptions)
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I think that the attraction of OSX to persons with a Unix background stem from Yellow Box programming environment along with the Quartz 2D GUI environment--all of this sitting on top of regular Unix.
In a real sense this solves many of the issues that exist with the current XWindows based GUIs that sit on Unix systems. Would it not be cool to have anti-aliasing and transparancy? Also, the whole display model built on top of EPS is really nice. It opens up a lot of possibilities.
All of this fun GUI stuff reachable via the Objective-C OpenStep APIs. After hearing about the reputation of these APIs, I know that I am anxious to play with them.
And all of this sitting on top of familiar Unix. I am guessing that moving things over and putting a new front end on, while being able to keep much, will be pretty darn attractive.
Now if they could only tone done the interface (the Aqua stuff) and get a little more friendly towards GNUStep (I like this as insurance in case Apple does something crazy, and I'd like to easily move stuff over to other versions of Unix) I'd be pretty happy.
Costs aside, I can see a few reasons to port apps to OS X from unix. Part of the reason will be to help Apple get more of software market, part of the reason will be just for fun. More importantly, I think the reputation of ease of use of an Apple will make people want to be part of the Apple software market. Throw in the stability of BSD and I think you have a winning OS.
China and India. It isn't NT that's growing marketshare in those markets.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Im not 100% sure about this but.. From what ive read mac is not includeing a Xserver. So what ever gui server they are useing.. Will gtk,qt stuff work with out an Xserver?
I have to agree, I don't see much real advantage for unix-folk (folken? volken? whatever) in porting to Mac OS 10. (Yes, 10, just say no to stupid hoops marketing departments dream up and try to impose on you.) After all, how many of us are actually going to be using it? Not nearly as many as use NT at work, I would wager.
But, porting a lot of unix stuff will be quite easy to do, and there ARE some excellent programmers in the Mac world. Expect to see THEM doing quite a bit of porting. And hopefully getting turned on to Free Software in the process. The Unix world could definately use an influx of people that understand concepts like 'usability' in a consumer, not uber-geek, context.
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Are we talking about porting BSD tools to OS X so they work the same way?
Or are we talking about rewriting BSD tools so they have the friendly, consistent graphical interface that people expect from a Mac?
IMHO, they're completely different issues. Generally free software developers are willing and eager to make their code more widely useable through portability, but not too keen on spending their own effort to dumb their stuff down instead of spending it on adding functionality.
---
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It is likely that Terminal.app, which provides csh or similar in a window for those that want, will not be part of the MacOSX default install.
So, either installing it as an optional package is the first sensible thing you do, or you install the third-party replacement package instead. There will be a third-party replacement package if required; Slashdotters will find life of MacOSX without csh or similar just too horrible to contemplate.
You then build whatever your product is natively on MacOSX. 4.4bsd under the hood, right?
You then write an AppKit (ie, Cocoa) graphical app that works it. IPC is strong in many forms, and the AppKit is way cool (and has a strong future -- find out with what Apple are writing their MacOSX development tools with).
I have such apps that I have written already working on MacOSX Server. It's not a big deal; working the NSTask object is easier than working fork() and execve().
With the plethora of open source software available, it is almost certain that porting to MacOS X will be dominant and Steve Jobs will have propelled Macintosh into and above the mainstream.
Depending on how open MacOS X is, and how easy porting is, we could see Macintosh being the dominant desktop OS again within our lifetimes.
Does it go on forever?
Yey! Once again I get to have a cool looking cube box running some spinoff version of Unix where all of the command line options are very slightly different. Except now the cube will be fluorescent blue and semi-transparent instead of jet black.
All just a little bit of history repeating.
Who'd have thought that when Apple bought NeXT, NeXT would end up winning??
the mac-bashing just amuses me. :)
1. "How can you compare an iMac to a RISC machine?"
Answer: An iMac is a RISC machine (PowerPC), if the distinction even matters anymore. Ever seen a G3/400 whip the crap out of an SGI O2 on FPU performance? Try it sometime.
2. "Apple is losing the MHz wars!!"
Answer: Try learning something about computers. Call me when you figure out how meaningful MHz is.
3. "The iMac is too puny to run OSX!"
Answer: The iMac can run up to G3/500 with 512M of RAM and as big of a (ugh, IDE) disk as you want. And it does run OSX DP4.
4. "But you have an iMac, so you're obviously stupid."
Answer: No, I have four iMacs, all running LinuxPPC. Get it right.
We finally have the opportunity here to redesign the actual configuration interface for UNIX programs. If we recoded the apps to use XML, we could have a consistent interface. Heck, we could use PyGNOME and use the same program to administrate and configure all of the apps.
I'd really like to see something like this done just for the sake of showing up all of those windoze zombies. You want a consistent, graphical interface without the idiotic registry? Use Unix!
You prefer command line? Keep using UNIX! Used to MacOS? You're using UNIX!
World domination... Cool...
Any of you guys heard of a thing called open source? If I'm a geek, and I want to run python/zope/php/mysql/whatever...on 2 G4's on a mach based UNIX, oh what am I to do. GCC is part of osX, so maybe "make-make install" comes to mind. Of course apps will get ported to osX from UNIX. When a graphics shop shells out $x10exp9 on G4's, and all of a sudden want's to cluster batch jobs on the cheap, I think we'll see macGimp and maybe beowulf. Geeks love UNIX. They like to play with more than one kind (if wise). And they want to run their favorite apps. Easy math.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
From www.gnustep.org:
GNUstep provides an Object-Oriented application development framework and tool set for use on a wide variety of computer platforms. GNUstep is based on the original OpenStep specification provided by NeXT, Inc. (now Apple). GNUstep is becoming more and more stable every day and is used in a production environment by several companies.
Cocoa's 'primary' language is still Objective-C. Java is included as a possibility, but the core is written in Obj-C, and then made accessible to Java through the JavaBridge. It's cool to be able to *use* Java, but for those of that prefer more pure OO languages, Obj-C is a godsend. :)
That isn't true at all. Let's be at least some what reasonable. A $400 Intel box:
1) Has a $300 or $400 Compuserve Rebate
2) Has a Celeron (read: shitty CPU)
3) Is most likely not as fast as a G3 iMac with 64 or 128 RAM, and a 6-10 gig HD, with a ATI based video accelerator.
4) The iMac has a monitor. Your $400 Intel box (after the Compuserve raping) doesnt have a monitor.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
First of all, I think we should throw out erroneous assumption that lurks behind this statement, that a consistant, logical, easy to use interface (like Mac OS) constitutes "dumbing down." Apple used to say that "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" with great justification. There are many benefits to be had from clicking a button rather than entering several lines of code, just as there are benefits to entering a single text command rather than renaming each of 20 files individually.
Civilization advances by the number of things we can do without thinking about them. In fact, that's why we have computers in the first place...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Anything that encourages people to use Objective C and the Cocoa (formerly OPENSTEP) API is great! Plus, maybe this will give GNUstep a kick in the butt. I'm drooling over all the easy ports to Linux using GNUstep.
How about being able to Moderate a story down below my threshold? I know this is a full blown Linux Zone and I am not a Mac fan, but give me a break! You should know by now that Mac users are at least as fanatical as Linux users (look at the drought during the 90's) and just when it looks like they are making a comeback someone blind sides them with trash like this? Remember when the thing to port from/to was M$ Windows? Give these guys a break! And perhaps realize that they have been spending a LOT of money for hardware and software and are used to it. Can you say the same thing about the Linux group? Markets exist where $$$ is spent.
i don't have the time to read all the posts at th moment, but i've skimmed and am a Mac administrator.
...and for the rest of them be made as simple as the original barebones Mac GUI - sounds pretty useful to me.
1) I think there are Mac admins out there who feel Mac OS X will provide better integrations of Macs on networks where fileshares are served up via NFS from *nix boxes. most of this is in acadamia. so we can stop using CAP, Revrdist and all those other silly things and use the same methods used to keep the rest of the workstations in-line and online.
2) I think the demand is for many of the admin tools to get ported to Mac OS for those of us who regulary use (and respect, and admire) *nix, but also feel the end user experience is on the Mac.. so we can use our really nifty hardware, administer the other Macs - set up for the users with the big icons and all the other stuff you slashdotters hate, but they - actual end users seem to like - and be able to jump from a shell to the Mac apps to simultaneously test and install user stuff.
IN OTHER WORDS: i don't think there is a big demand (yet, and i wonder if there would be) to port *nix stuff to Mac and create a front end for it in Aqua. this is merely for the fact that OS X is a BSD and the new OS will make having Macs a part of your computing environs a good thing, so long as the tools a ported.
i think that's pretty damned obvious and simple. an OS that can be made as powerful as any other *nix
just my $.02, though.
Disclaimer: I have not seen MacOS X from the inside. I have seen Nextstep from the inside. It was beautiful.
Nextstep had one of the easiest and most elegant programming languages I have ever seen. It was called Objective-C and was OO in C done right: Pure C with the Object mechanisms of Smalltalk thrown in. You might have seen part of the ideas behind Objective-C recently: The signal-slot mechanism in the Meta Object Compiler (moc) in Qt has its roots in the Objective-C model, and Gtk ported that to plain C. In Objective-C it is part of the language, no moc or handcoding necessary, and all objects, slots and method invocations use this mechanism.
On top of this, the Next people built an API and tools which really revolutionized programming for me. This was the only programming environment where I actually felt supported by the API and programmed to solve a problem, instead of fighting shortcomings of the system.
The OO toolkits that came with their Objective-C compilers were one of the most cleverly designed collection of classes I have ever seen: By combining components of the Appkit and the Enterprise Object Framework, I was able to built applications which navigated a system of SQL tables, browsed tables and even allowed simple changes in table values in the SQL database - and I was able to do this by simply connecting the components in Interface Builder, no compile necessary for a working application! Of course you could compile and save the result and had a standalone application which worked just as well.
But Nextsteps Objective-C objects had enough metainformation ready that they were loadable and runnable (sic!) in their equivalent of Kdevelop. This is was reusable component software done right can do for you. Talk about fragile superclasses, about Corba and COM. I had all this in 1994, on a 25 MHz 68040 with 20 MB RAM, and it was better than anything that money can buy now.
On top of this, Nextstep delivered a GUI which painted every single pixel on the display with a postscript interpreter. This allowed you to write widgets in postscript, load them into the (possibly running remotely) display server, and run them with a single command. In todays buzzwords that would be equivalent to writing all your widgets in Java, uploading them to your X server once, and have them running up there, instead of sending four million drawing commands each time your want your widget shown. Nextsteps GUI displaying remotely was faster than X even with compression on slow links, because "execute that widget again" is faster to transmit and parse than all these drawing commands, and "your button 17 has been hit by left-mouse-down" is faster on the wire than long lists "mouse-move to coordinates x,y", "mouse-down on x,y" events.
The fact that postscript can do coordinate transformation, font handling, color, alpha channel mixing and several other things right which X still cannot do properly today helped, too.
But enough of the nostalgy. Here is my advice to you: Have a close look at MacOS X native API, at the language, at the object system, at the display system and at several other things. The Next people are extremely bright, and they are still at work at Apple. Unless Apple managed to really fuck up their Nextstep heritage, you have the chance to see a really, really nicely engineered system and you may learn a lot of things about elegance of design, about handling software components, and about OOP outside the scope of C++ and Java.
Do not try to port your code. You won't be doing your code and the MacOS X API a favor. Make your first experiences with natively designed code, and try to forget your Unix and C++ heritage when you make them. Unlearn what you have done previously and relearn programming and OO their way. Try to see the beauty of their way and widen your perspective.
Then come back and review your old work in your newly collected experience. I will find that your have many new and exciting ideas what to do and how to do it differently.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Tenon Intersystems has already announced X (as in X11R6.4) for X (as in Mac OS X).
Therefore, for simple ports, it should be a no-brainer.
Carbon or Cocoa ports will demand a wee bit more work, depending on the app.
But, MacOSX is not all about UNIX. Yeah, the back-end is based on BSD, but Apple is doing their best to make sure that the end user will NEVER have to see the BSD side of things, unless he wants to.
You forgot to get extra monitors for the extra video cards, you forgot to get AirPort (card and hub).
--Matthew
More expensive eh?
Solaris or SCO or HP-UX costs more than Apple's standard $90 or so liscense fee.
Heck most of the GNU Linus distros cost half of that with support.
As far as hardware . . . it depends on what you're looking for. Your average x86 user is using a bunch of GNU tools that are easily ported and have been already (think about the NetBSD or LinuxPPC distros). The people who really care about applications being ported are looking for stuff like Maya which is more expensive than a dual-proc G4.
The differences are not extreme and the benefits of being with large user base, an established and high-profile company, and the coolest hardware (how many x86 users don't have a fan in their computer?) hardware around are great.
joey
+-------+ between the wish and the thing lies the world - All the Pretty Horses
When OS X ships, new iMacs will have it preinstalled...
As for CPUs, 8.0 was the first to leave out non-PowerPC machines, and 8.5 left out non-G3 machines.
The simplest way of getting X11 on Mac OS X (or Windows, for that matter) may be to port the UNIX VNC server. It implements an X11 server and frame buffer completely in software.
If Apple is smart and wants to go for this market, they should start including X11 compatibility in their base system.
The disadvantages of each tend to be overstated during Holy Wars, but the jist of it boils down to this:
GUI's have a tendency to limit options for the sake of simplicity and eat more processor cycles. CLI's create less load on your system and don't have to worry about being pretty, but if you forget the exact -Option that you need for a command, productivity stops while you read MAN pages and O'Reilly books.
IMHO, most GUI's absolutely suck. MacOS has always been the GIU that sucks the least, in that it has all the simplicity for the luser that you get from a shell-built option screen, but the rewards of spending time learning how deep the rabbit hole goes are actually way beyond what most non-mac geeks tend to assume.
I will grant that if you are a Linux or Windows guru, the Macintosh Way looks incredibly unappealing from the outside, but if you were to spend the kind of hours learning the Mac's more obscure abilities that you spent learning sed and awk (or M$-SQL, to use a Windows example), you would probably dig it.
Amiga and Be zealots are free to ignore every word I said here. There's just no reasoning with you people. (I'm just kidding. Please put the gun down and I will let you tell me all about CPU efficiency and how sadly misguided I am.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You didn't take the MacOSochists into account...
the ones who hack the mac...
I've successfully installed and run 9.0.1 on a 7100 (PPC 601 80; SCSI, ADB, 2x CD; 1 MB vram (after upgrade, IIRC); 1 NuBus filled with a second monitor) with 128 MB ram. Not zippy, but doable. I know someone who installed 9.0 on a stock (with 56 MB total ram) 7100 as well.
Remember: Supported != Exclusive to.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
...is going to be a big way to pull this off, that will make a lot of folks happy.
I can name 10 things off the top of my head that would be perfect for this; in fact, any OS X apps floating around out there now are just that.
A 'frinstance...
I would *LOVE* to see an "Aquatic" version of Icecast and Shout. Basically, your "Server" app that lets you set all of the commandline flag, that when you press "Start" puts up a little floating window that tails the log...
And a "Streamer" app that lets you build your playlist(s), saves your prefs, and runs with it.
There are tons of apps like this to be written, by either using Cocoa, or Java/Swing with the Aqua look and feel.
If I were a better programmer...I'd have my IceCast for MacOS X up and running now...
Ah well.
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
...but we're talking about people who consider vi and emacs the only real choices for text editing.
Real hackers learn new interfaces and languages effortlessly, so they choose the ones that are most efficient, not the ones that are most easily learned: Unix over Mac, Perl over BASIC, etc. By "dumbing it down" I mean making an easier learning curve, whether it sacrifices efficiency of use or just takes more effort to create.
Dumbing things down does benefit the majority of users, but not the hackers, who are generally writing for themselves and each other when they create free software. The kindred spirits get it already, why should they spend their efforts making it easy for the incredibly dull and stupid people who tormented them when they had the opportunity (i.e. in school)?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The dual advantage of a good base os (BSD) with a utterly amazing GUI front end (and I'm talk'n from developer's perspective) is going to be significant.
I've worked with many different OS's, frameworks, and tools over the last ten years including JBuilder, VisualCafe, VisualAge, Corba, EJB, TopLink, WinNT, MacOS, BSD's, etc. etc. etc. and really they are all still playing catch-up to the technology that was initially developed in 1991 in NeXTStep 2.x! I have never owned a Mac, but I am now seriously considering it because it will be a good development platform no matter what one is doing!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
I'm not sure I see the benefits that will drive people to migrate. OSX will have a nice user interface, but MS windoze already serves the market for the plug and chug servers.
Linux is far ahead of the game on the unix side, and apple will have a lot of catching up to do. I'm surprised a little that Jobs didn't learn much from the NeXT fiasco....
-- Moondog
To take the latter case first, the number of potential Mac OS X instances out there is close to the same number as of all other unixen combined. Those who produce only unix versions of software have the potential to tap into (say) twice as many potential customers, and the port will be much easier than porting to Windoze because they only have to deal with GUI issues (assuming there are any - e.g. porting cli stuff should be trivial), rather than GUI + Crappy OS + Different OS.
As for the former case, any company that has gone through the pain of porting to Windoze will likely have taken two routes: the dumb way, i.e. Branched their system entirely so that there is separate development of both versions and ne'er the twain shall meet; a smarter way, abstracted the GUI as much as possible from the logic. If they went the dumb way, the port will be harder and more expensive, so they may not see as significant an advantage - though it also means that they are doomed to waste lots of money as fashions in OS's change. The smarter way however, means that they can reap the benefit from their previous pain: the port will be much easier, and given that they seem to find some profit in their other unixen, the effort will be justified. Again; the GUI is the only real stumbling block: anything without a complicated GUI would be trivial, and OS X would just become another flavor of unix, offering a large number of potential customers.
The other potenial for crossover is for Mac Developers who have remained largely in that market to start developing (say) Linux versions of their products because they have already made the core logic of their products unix-ish. Such companies would essentially be just like the unix-only product developers; they get the advantage of a much larger market for their wares with a much reduced cost of porting.
In general, how couldn't there be an advantage?
Anyway, my rant on the issue is that sites like MacInsider are touting the fact that the Mach kernel "Has been forged in the fire of open source peer review, etc.", but then they're ripping it out of the open source community and making it proprietary.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Have you considered the possibilites? A Dual processor RISC box for under five grand, running a BSD-derived OS. Seriously, the processors are faster than anything Intel has ever concieved (We've known for years that CISC sucks, but we still use em), they are cheap, the OS is fast and stable and secure (these are assumptions, the truth will be found out soon...).
It's the best web server the world has ever seen!
Maybe this will help clear it up for you on how hard it is to add MP support for Mac... This is from Graeme Devine's plan file from July 24: .plan, click here
"I'll be adding the SMP support into Q3A and shipping a build off to Apple today"
Hmm, adding it in and shipping it the same day... doesn't sound too hard if you ask me. if you wanna check out the whole
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Umm, am I the only one here that finds it funny that this would be the topic when there are three or for things that immediately come to mind when someone asks this question?
* More users. I can't be for certain, but Apple has always had more people using different version of Mac OS than all the different UNIXes, right? (Not talking Linux or UNIX-clones)
* Price. I've heard UNIX machines cost way past 2500 dollars, which will get you a pretty spiffy G4 right now, with plenty of goodies included.
* Ease. If I read the specs for OS X right, there should be little porting problems involved.
will this work the other way around, will apple after porting Quick time to OS X recompile it for Linux and the other *nix?
AppleSeed is cheaper, easier to set up and run, and potentially faster (on Mac OS 8 & 9 due to cooperative multitasking) than Beowulf. There is no reason it should not translate over to Mac OS X, as all the underpinnings will be there in OS X. Note that the preemptive multitasking will result in poorer performance on OS X than on Mac OS 9, given the same hardware.
I realize where you're coming from, but Apple is doing its best to play down Objective C and play up Java, because the latter has bigger mind/market share, and they're doing their best to make sure it isn't a poor cousin to Objective C with this framework.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This is true of the OS, but I doubt that it will be formally enforced with apps. However, I think you are on to something here.
Just as the UNIX culture has an ethic of doing the Right Thing when writing software, mostly centered around maximizing efficiency and portability of code, the culture of Mac gurus have very strong opinions about well-designed code, particularilly in the area of making your user interface logical, simple, and seamlessly consistant with the conventions of the MacOS.
A good example of thier fury was MS-Word version 6.
In spite of the massive hatred of DOS and anything else to do with Redmond, Word 5 was the most popular word processor for the Mac ever. It had been, since the very first version, designed specifically for the Mac, and clung tight to the reccomendation the of GUI cannon that was coming out of Cupertino throughout the late 80's and early 90's.
When M$ came to version 6, they decided that what Mac users really wanted was interoperability with the Windows box they had at work, so instead of adding Word6 features to the Mac version of Word5, they did a crufty port of Word6 for Windows to the MacOS, complete with Windowsy dialog boxes and button bars. Some of it even used the old windows code, with translators copied into the Mac system folder during installation. Even the Word Macro viruses were cross-platform transparent.
The backlash was epic in scale.
Macophiles ourtright refused to "upgrade", and if they did give up their Word5, it was to switch vendors to Word Perfect For Mac or Nissus Writer. Some of them even switched to heavy-duty page-layout apps, like PageMaker or Quark, rather than deal with the steaming pile of crap that Word6 was quickly discovered to be.
Microsoft eventually recovered when they release Office98, but only because they are Microsoft. A small company that made such a huge misstep would probably never be heard from again.
My advice to *n?x vendors who want to reach a wider audience by porting their C app to the Mac platform would be to either bone up on Mac GUI conventions, or else perhaps contact a MUG and find a Mac code geek who is willing to work with you on it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
- Joe
-Joe
Assuming that only 5 million to 10 million of the 30 million or so Mac users. (Yes there are that many. A conservative number.) Then a commercial Unix vendor will suddenly have a huge market to exploit. That will be much less effort to port then a Unix -> windows port. There will be commercial and free ports of X which will take the work out of doing the GUI. Mac OS X is also totally POSIX compliant . A added bonus. For free programmers, and commercial vendors alike this will provide a exciting oppurtunity to expand there user bases, and give there users another option.
Cheers,
WFE
===========
I used to be a mac developer. I worked on several high profile mac projects, and more than my share of commercial flops. During the iMac boom, developers were being snatched up right and left to create the next wave of software. This boom brought my some very nice work. Yet it is still in vain....Even with the iMac boom and Apple profitability developers are being mistreated by Apple. This is probably the biggest source of frustration for me. To get on the professional mailing list for Apple costs something around USD$400. Their developer tech support (DTS) has been going downhill since 1992. I won't write muchless port to Mac OS X, I won't even write for it. I grew up on Macs, learned how to program on macs, but I'm cutting the line. Most Mac software writers I know struggle, they barely make ends meat. Now that I write Windows software, I seen the life of luxury! There is something to be said about massive stock options. The Mac market is so small, hardly any software companies out there are big enough to offer stock, much less stock that is worth something.
The future? Apple's future is still as grey as ever in my opinion. They still don't have a clearly defined market (the iCube just illustrates this). The past 4 years have just seen them try one thing and back off. Mac OS X may survive, but does anyone really care? It's not as open as linux, it still costs more than an eMachines running redhat. I don't think Apple will ever die, but I seriously doubt they'll truly thrive. Free software won't change that either. The average Home Joe won't download unix software, compile it, and run on the weekend. They don't know how, and they certainly don't care.
And why is OSX not *NIX? It's simply the next evolution of NeXT, from what I can see. Terminal available and everything, with a pure BSD base.
The kernel is not proprietary. In fact, the complete, functional core OS, called Darwin, is open source:
http://publicsource.apple.com
From what I've read on the Darwin developers' list, there's already an X server running on it, and the Intel port is booting.
There was a virtal screen app for OpenStep known as "VirtSpace" ... There is nothing that indicates that it would not be possible to port or recreate it for OSX. It's just not going to ship with OS-X.
Burris
If you are comparing the success of the Macintosh platform against Windows, then yes. Putting asside the debate over whether all M$ systems are the same animal, then the MacOS is a distant second in the market, and might get knocked down to third by Linux if/when the Red Hat install app becomes a little less crappy.
If you are discussing the success of Apple Computer as a business which sells computers, then stacking "Apple" against "everybody else" is just plain silly. Apple is a steady top-six performer, and there are a lot of PC makers who would love their kind of numbers (not to mention their margins).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'm not a sysadmin nor do I have extensive experience with Unix boxen. Somebody out there surely has shopped for and uses Unix workstations. Therefore, I ask you to confirm or not confirm my impression that many Unix boxes are far more expensive than a Mac. What are the ballpark prices for the various workstations below?
A Sun Solaris Workstation
An HP PA-Risc (did I get that right?) Workstation
An IBM AIX Workstation
A Compaq Tru-64 Alpha Workstation
An SGI Irix Workstation
A SCO Workstation
A BSD Workstation
A Linux Workstation
An OS X Workstation
I'm guessing the OS X Workstation will be priced on the low end, obviously not as low as a Celeron/Linux box but not as high as a Sparcstation/Solaris box either.
Also, I'm wondering, how far is each platform entrenched in the real world? Are there more businesses, universities, laboratories, etc. using Intel/SCO boxes than Sun or HP boxes? What I'm getting at is that there are cheap Intel boxes out there but is anybody using them to a great extent or are they typically shelling out the cash for Sun/HP/IBM/Compaq boxes?
I think we may find that the statement of Apple hardware and software being more expensive than what is expected in the Unix world is greatly exaggerated. In fact, I bet an Apple workstation will be a pretty good deal.
> Most Linux users are for servers
Source for this claim, please?
We know from Netcraft that we have around 5 million servers running Linux (less some portion that represents virtual hosting). Now suppose your claim is wrong? Where does that leave the relative sizes of the userbases?
I know quite a few people running Linux on their desktops at work, at home, or both. So far as I know, none of them are running it as a server. Perhaps this is a statistical fluke, but since you provide no basis for your claim whatsoever, I'm going to assume that my slice of the world is typical, and that there are more Linuces on the desktop than in the server barn. At least until someone presents some actual facts or solid arguments to the contrary.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If I type "console" at the login window, that's just what I get: a text-only session at the console. Also, by editing the init scripts, you can prevent the Window Manager from starting.
Moreover, ssh runs pretty fine, so remote administration is not really a problem. Besides, Apple's current server software (Netboot server and Macintosh Manager server on OS X Server and Appleshare IP on Mac OS 9) come with GUI remote admin tools. Also, the afpserver (afp = apple filing protocol) on OS X Server is configurable through a web/java based interface. I've used this for over a year on four Mac servers (two OS X Servers, two MacOS 9) and it works fine.
gertiI dual-boot OSX DP4 at the moment and I have some experience porting over various unix programs.
How hard is it, do you ask?
Well, it's DEAD easy. All of your common libraries are there to use (ncurses, for example) and all of the common development tools are there (gcc, autoconf, etc...)
Many programs will compile and install fine with just a:
./configure
make
make install
For the ones that won't, you'll probably just need to do something like:
./configure --host=freebsd
or something similiar to have the script get some sort of handle of what type of system you're running. At the most, I've had to modify the configure.in to tell it where to find things that are in non-standard locations (the Java libraries, for example).
I'd say 99% of these issues will go away whenever a revision of autoconf comes out that automatically knows something about OSX (Apple changed the uname between OSX Server and DP4, for example).
I'm very serious when I say that right NOW (in this pre-release version) you WON'T be disappointed when it comes to porting over command-line tools.
> How easy is it to port existing Unix apps to MacOSX? The answer is: easy because of the existing BSD API and the x11/Motif/Less-tif libs that have already been ported to the platform in both Open-source and commercial environs.
Which means that commercial software shops can now see a |market| = |MacOSX| + |Linux| + |Unix|, with very little configuration variance across the whole market. This should tempt more companies into ventures like what Loki is doing with games, and perhaps also tempt more into writing original native applications as well.
As for non-commercial software, our mindshare just grew in proportion to the same marketshare formula.
As a side note, I'll mention that there is already similar activity for applications running under X on Windows systems. Freeciv, for example, already runs under Linux, Unix, VMS, and Windows. Now we can add the Mac too, eh? It turns out that the much-despised X is the infrastructure that allows building the world's most portable GUI applications.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Go ahead, try and tell me that more than 1 out of 10 computer progammers didn't consider the later years of school to be Hell, and got along well with most of the people there. Being bright enough and interested enough to program computers practically guarantees a certain amount of abuse from others.
When people write free software, it usually isn't for the benefit of the general public, but for the free software community: mostly other hackers, the kind of people they could sit down with and have a good conversation with, not the kind whose eyes roll every time you try to bring up an interesting topic. They write for fun or for respect in the eyes of those they themselves respect, not to help people who are too dumb to help themselves.
They only do that for money.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You can get $300 PC's even without some un-rebate.
A 15" monitor is ~ $100, so the lack of one in a PC comparison is no big deal. Although, you could spring for a 19" monitor at ~$300 (trumps the HELL out of what an imac has).
The rage is a tossup. It may or may not have a point being in a Macintosh. Unless you are doing 3D gaming, it might not even matter at all.
That would be the Berkeley Software Distribution.
As in Berkeley, University California of, hotbed of UNIX research. Originally Unix was invented by Bell Labs, then Berkeley licenced the code for academic use. Originally it was a great deal but as UNIX grew in popularity, AT&T dramatically raised prices for the source code release. In response BSD was re-written so as not to contain any of the original AT&T code. For more information, see the UNIX system administrators guide by Nemeth et. al., page 1. (BTW if you are a UNIX sysadmin, you should have this book.)
Linux may not be UNIX but BSD is indeed. UNIX does not necessarily mean a System V OS.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Not really true. With a bit more cash and a little know-how PowerMacs can run Windows programs and a variety of Linux/Unix programs with LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux or NetBSD. Plus, there's the Mac applications. With OS X the options will become easier to get with the Unix options more readily available.
The people who need Doze. Instead of Windows on VPC, lets install RedHat. Then in X we have WINE or VMWare running Windows.
Who needs CompaQ or Dell?
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I don't usually criticize slashdot; I hardly comment at all.
:-) /.'s editors to make sure they have a good source of information to base discussions on, to ensure that we have a reasonably intelligent discussion. It seems that people here have more questions about this topic than answers, and no obvious way (ie. linkage) to find the necessary answers.
But why was this posted? I'm a longtime Mac fan, and a CS student, so, naturally, I'm very excited about what the amalgation of NetBSD, OpenStep, and MacOS that is MacOS X will bring to my computing experience.
The article at MacCentral is hardly "news for nerds", however. There's much better sources for technical information concerning MacOS X. Plus, the article doesn't seem especially central to the topic of the post itself.
Now, because the article doesn't really serve as a good source of information, essentially what we have is a discussion about porting issues in MacOS X -- not a bad thing -- but a discussion without a foundation of facts.
Consequently, I see a lot of ill-informed posts here. Few of them are trolls, which is quite heartening, but it would behoove (I love that word
My two cents.
Jon
P.S. Check out http://developer.apple.com/macosx/ and http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/ index.html for tech info from Apple.
Most of the comments I've glanced over are angled at someone buying MacOS X as a server... for which it will probably start out inferior, esp for price. Rarely does linux work as well out of the box as a Mac, but that's not the point.
The point is that for users who 1) don't enjoy (even if they're good at it) taking apart their computers and 2) who's time is worth a decent penny should generally buy a mac. Often, they actually do buy a mac. I bought a PC because I was poor, with money, I'd buy a mac.
For these people, who are most of mac users, X should be a godsend in terms of speed and reliability. The beauty of everyone who buys the best low-end workstation (mac) automatically getting a *nix system underneath, is amazing to me. This should blow everything else away... and no argument I can see except stigyness would make someone buy something else...
many happy fnords -
Arete
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
It has been a while since I last used the OpenStep API, but IIRC, there were macros NS_DURING, NS_HANDLER, and NS_ENDHANDLER which you could use to bracket code like try { } catch() { }, and exceptions were raised by the raise message to an NSException. It's not as pretty as Java's language-level exception handling, but it's still there. And hey, Python doesn't have access control either. Remember the programmer is in charge, even in OO programming; s/he shouldn't have to directly access private object data normally, but s/he should be able to when the need arises. :-) -Joe
- Joe
-Joe
The main point of this discussion is not about taking developers away from KDE, Gnome or anyone else. Most of the porting would likely be done by individuals who would have only peripheral roles with the development of those platforms.
The idea is to make software available elsewhere. Once the software is available on another platform more developers are able to contribute to the project.
Take for example Apache. Suppose Apache was only made available for Linux on x86. No Solaris, no BSD, no Windows NT, nothing other than Linux on x86. How many of the developers that contribute to Apache work exclusively on x86 Linux?
I'm willing to bet that quite a few use something else and that Apache would not be where it is now had it not been for the variety of platforms it runs on and more importantly the variety of developers coming from various backgrounds.
Sure, that could be done. No problem. But I don't think that would be the best use of nerdpower. To my eye, Linux apps are generally pretty poor in the UI category. Just because there's a menu and buttons, that doesn't mean it's "user friendly". I give TkRat as an example.
It would be better to think carefully about what you're purpose is and who your audience is and build from there. Gnumeric is a good program, sure, but to compete with MS Excel, you don't have to match feature-for-feature, but make the way the user interfaces with it easier and cleaner, with good, to-the-point help. (needless to say, don't emulate the dancing Mac SE/paperclip).
The Mac interface is heavily influenced by it's original toaster design: screen space is valuable, don't fill it up with pretty widgets, and only have a single menubar. It caries over to larger screens well, because it's easier for people to get confused when there are multiple menubars on the screen.
Total rewrite? Well, maybe. But by doing so, perhaps the whole Unix community can benefit by looking at current paradigms and re-thinking how things can be done.
Of course, this is purely my opinion...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The basic POSIX underpinnings of BeOS mean that the cost of porting the new platform is fairly low, so ports have been both rapid and widespread. All of the same applies to MacOS X.
It would seem to me that (in particular) the Linux crowd would love to leverage the work Apple is doing with wireless, 1 gig ethernet, multiprocessor machines (as a commodity), firewire, Quartz, etc etc. and thus make their sw really interesting and fun to use. Quite honestly, xterm, games etc. over wireless/Airport would be way cool - firewire devices (stereo, video etc). Apple has been doing this for almost a year.
For any smart developer, the idea is not to out program Apple but to take what Apple delivers and make it truly great/cool/fun etc.
Maybe I'm just in a good mood, but that little PS is about the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. I'm going to appropriate it shamelessly. Great post! Thanks!
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Wouldn't it be a good start to make the standard GNU utils available under MacOS X? I mean, that way free software makes its way further into the Mac systems.
- If you mean any of the hundreds of free/open source libraries and command-line utilities/servers, the answer is "duh". In almost all cases (once OSX ships) there will be little or no "porting" required. All of these apps, from Apache to Pine to vi will build with a simple "make".
- If you mean open-source apps that use X11R6, perhaps in conjuction with a GUI toolkit, then it depends. There is already at least one X11R6 server for OSX, and you can be sure that there will be some excellent solutions for X11R6, including "rootless" operation using Aqua windows, and so forth. I think it would be interesting if the popular GUI toolkits were ported from X11R6 to Aqua (a fair amount of work). Then you wouldn't need X11R6 and your apps would run without modification.
- Finally, commercial apps. Commercial UNIX applications will only become available as MacOSX binaries if the GUI barriers can be avoided, and if the producers of those applications consider OSX to be a "serious enough" platform. It's not so much an issue of how well these apps would run on MacOS - it's really a political and religious barrier. Look at how long it took for Oracle to recognize Linux.
I would also note that while the OSX developer releases demonstrate some interesting technology, they still have a *long* way to go before they have anything that would be considered an "upgrade" from OS9. For now I'll have to keep one each of Mac, PC, FreeBSD and Linux all stacked under my desk.As much as I can't stand the Windows OS, I choose it for running CAD tools over the Solaris alternatives, mostly because of the fact that -all- of my tools will run under Windows. A platform's success is all about momentum - more apps, more users; more users, more apps. I would much rather run these tools on a less intrusive OS such as Linux or Mac. The reason Linux has only achieved moderate success in gaining commercial support is because it is still widely regarded as an OS for hacker kids, not serious professionals. As much as this sentiment annoys me, it can't be denied that Linux users generally don't like paying for their software (let's see, CodeWarrior or GCC?) so the software has to be something spectacular if they're going to sell it at all. Will MacOS do any better? Hopefully, Apple will leverage their platform's reputation for excellent ease of use, graphics, and video capabilities (the areas where they clearly have an advantage over Unix) in convincing the UNIX software developers to port their engineering tools and such. It hasn't worked in the past, but soon it will be so easy to move those programs to OSX.
If Apple plays their cards right, they stand to deliver the first platform that will appeal to both free and commercial software developers, while also offering the flexibility, ease of use, and great hardware that consumers want. Can they pull it off?
"Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system that costs more in hardware and OS software both?"
Come on and get a clue! As RMS is so fond of telling everyone who will listen (or who won't for that matter), free software is not about price! If he was interested in no-cost instead of open source, he would have founded the Freewarez Foundation.
And if you look at commerical Unix systems, you'll find with only a few exceptions, that they all cost much more than Apple, both for the hardware and the software.
Who gives a rip what a Macintosh costs? If you're a commercial developer, go out and buy one or lose that market! If you can't afford a single Macintosh to use for porting, maybe it's time to rethink your whole business model from the ground up. I've lived so long with developers telling me I have to upgrade my hardware in order to use their software that I just don't have sympathy for this complaint of theirs.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
All good reasons, none relevant to switching to Apple. If Apple gets a significant share of UNIX workstation desktops, its going to be stealing them from Linux and FreeBSD.
unix UIs will never be ported to native OSX, because OSX will have that crappy X interface ported to it. Yuck.
Most X (or web) interfaces suck, because for a really good UI, you need to track massive amounts of state information -and- be able to present information in realtime, something that the web and X are pretty bad at doing (X is better at that than the web, but - realtime UI on X = bandwidth).
Good UI needs thought, and not just implementation thought. It needs the kind of thought that says "who is my user, what are they trying to do, and how do I make it easier for them to do that." Copying a UI isn't good enough; you should be able to explain why something is the way it is, and how it helps the user.
Plus, if you copy a UI blindly, you don't learn why/why not. A UI decision today may be the wrong one next year, but if you don't remember (or never knew) why one thing or another happened, you're screwed.
Take frameworks, for example. The 1.0 AWT was terrible, just terrible. For those of us used to using really good stuff (powerplant, macapp, etc) the AWT was a Great Leap Backward. The API was awful, there was too much subclassing, and you had to understand the internals of the AWT to actually do anything. It's obvious that the AWT folks at that time didn't have any idea who their market was, and what the state-of-the-art was.
Well, I guess sun got some graphical API users, because the AWT 1.1 was a lot, lot better: it actually made sense! (Actually, they got the IFC guys, I think, which is still better than the AWT/swing IMO).
What this shows is that just throwing an interface out there isn't enough...look around, and steal what's good, and think about your users.
--- only for the squeamish
It's really hard to be slower than Mac OS 9, with it's gulag of partially native/partially emulated I/O paths, but Mac OS X DP4 manages it . This may improve by the public beta or the final release.
are you a complete moron? mac os x dp4 is a developer's release not for general consumption. would you expect developer releases of say photoshop to be fully optimized and near as speedy as the final product? dp4 is a pre-beta release, your expectations for pre-beta software are quite high and i would wonder what your standing is based on. even when the public beta is released i wouldn't expect that it will be in its speed-finalized form. os x is not just another kludge building os - it is completely reconstructed (while firmly structured on next). give apple some credit and some time to construct the os properly.
I installed Darwin on my own box a few months ago. It works fine for running Apache and other server software. I didn't have the time to hunt down good docs for NetInfo just so I could manage accounts properly, so I went back to using Linux as soon as I was done playing around.
LNAWTBFEUOA: Linux nerds are worse than biochemists for excessive usage of acronyms.
My yeast-2-hybrid system wasn't working yesterday because I added too much EDTA to my HEPES buffer. This caused a pH overload and resulted in my PIPES ppt'ing. I checked for proteases with PMSF and found to my surprise that I had a HIV virus in my T-cells. Well, batteries never last long anyway. If I could just increase the resolution of my Yeast-2-hybrid screen I could do away with the T-cells all together and use the B-cells. If only they would respond to MHC complexes (type II that is). The network issues here are just toooo cytoskeletal for my CNS dude!!!!!
Disclaimer: I understand ~1/2 of the acronyms on this thread and now I know how elite I must sound somtimes.
Can you judge a man by his acronyms?
no sig.
> Apple stopped selling Mac OS X Server a week or so ago. It's officially end-of-lifed.
No it's not! Check your facts. It's just temporarily unavailable because quality assurance tests of OSXs running on the new G4s aren't complete yet. The fact that it's not on apple's website doesn't mean you can't order it.
Why do people panic so much without reason? The OS X (server) developers' and administrators' lists are flooded with "aaargh no more os x server" messages. Just wait a few weeks and it'll be there again.
Apple is commited to the Mac admins and their servers. In fact, they're busy with the next version of the fileserver (sort of AppleShare IP running on OS X Server), as a call for selected test sites was made by Apple on the OS X Server admin list. The transition from OS X Server to OS X plus server tools will be fairly smooth, I bet.
gerti
If OSX is BSD based, can we then get the UI to run on all *IX boxes(or is that what we're talking about)?
I see we can port to OSX but could we replace the crappy CDE with a standard interface derived from the Apple UI?
Could we have all save buttons on KDE and Gnome draw from a centeral graphic tablet that a user picks, possibly based on OSX? Why cant we just write save?
I don't mean to start a flame war, but KDE and Gnome just look very micro$oft UI to me. I would like to run somthing non windows(that works) like on Xserver.
Download Darwin. Install. Don't bother with X.
If you are only going to use the command line, what features does MacOS X have that Darwin doesn't? (OK, there are quite a few like some drivers that can't be open sourced and ppp for the version I'm running (1.0.2)).
Darwin is the core of MacOS X , and is moving towards giving most of the command line capabilities of MacOS X. And it's open source.
I can tell you're a foreigner, you speak like one,
you're probably french, no wonder I dislike french
people. Of course you don't know anyone with a
mac, duh, you're too busy trying to get 600fps
in *cough* qwank *cough* 3.
you don't use a mac? oh, well, certainly its
destiny is death, we all know the world revolves
around you and your BSoD/OS installation
(dear BSDI lovers: i know that may be a bit close for comfort, nuffin' personal heh)
... unless you are prepared to do a proper job of the user interface.
The real advantage of MacOS is the relatively clean user interface, and that most of the applications follow the rules.
Hopefully MacOS X is going to maintain that usability (and dare I hope even improve on it?).
Now look at the X world (I use Linux at work). Many apps have different appearances because they use different windowing toolkits and many different conventions for how to do things (how many ways of scrolling or cut and paste are there? - compare Netscape, xemacs, xman). It all goes well enough, but I don't find it as nice to use as MacOS.
I think you'll find that MacOS users generally are used to a consistant user interface and expect one. (There's been a bit of a fuss about some of Apple's own stuff not following the rules - many people use the Quicktime 3 player with Quicktime 4 because the Quicktime 4 player is a mess). Anything that is just 'ported' and doesn't follow the standards is likely to sink like a lead balloon if there is any sort of 'native' alternative.
Having said that, there are lots of non-gui things that I'd be really happy to be able to use - CORBA, Mercury, etc. that don't need a GUI. Being able to port such 'back-end' stuff will be a real boost.
OSX is based on BSD, yes?
Does that mean that for the first time (aside from LinuxPPC), Macs will have....a command line?
:EEK:
Thank you.
4920616D206E6F7420656C6974652E
Remove the obvious to email me.
+++ATH0
One of CP/M's problems when the hard disk rolled around was that it *didn't* have directories.
CP/M had a four bit numerical user, and only files from the current user setting (no security; you just told it which user to be) and those for user 0 were visible. There was no protection, iirc, to prevent user 7 from overwriting a file with the asame name in user 3.
By the mid 80's, CP/M-86 was running MS-DOS executabiles and reading MS-DOS disks, but couldn't access MS-DOS directories.
OTOH, CCP/M (later CDOS, later DR-DOS, etc.) could multitask MS-DOS programs on an 8086. But the lack of directories was a killer . . .
hawk
Most of the apps for OSX will probably be written for/including calls for the Carbon layer and using interface components from Aqua. These would be almost impossible to port to any other BSD/*nix system. Are Mac programmers going to use a low level C compiler or a nice visual interface that Apple and other vendors will provide for them.
If you ask me, a lot of apps will be ported to OSX and further developed only for OSX. Nothing will move back to BSD. Did we ever see any Rhapsody apps ported to BSD? No.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
$ configure --host=`/usr/libexec/config.guess` [...]
Anyway the company would have to support every platform they port to. I thought we were discussing commercial programs and not GPL programs? Lets say if I wrote a program, say WidgetWacker for Linux, and then I ported it to OSX, I would have to have staff support both OSX and Linux in case there is any problems, right? Or I could drop Linux and only support OSX?
I suppose that some companies might drop one platform for another. After all, many dropped DOS for Windows or MacOS for Windows over the time. Remember when Sierra had Apple // support?
It is not like Netscape where every platform can be supported.