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No Love For Darwin?
There's an interesting column regarding the attention -- or lack thereof -- that Darwin is getting, at least compared to OS X. Somogyi points some out some interesting diversions of interest that people are having, and what exactly is Apple /doing/ about Darwin?
'When is Quicktime player components going to be open sourced?'
Jesus, hasn't this issue died yet? how many times does one have to keep posting the same thing to slashdot before people get it?
one more time: Apple very little control over getting Quicktime to work under Linux!! in fact, though not "opensource," Quicktime is already a well-published standard. the issue is that the popular CODECS for Quicktime aren't available on Linux. so if you have a problem with that, talk to Sorenson, who make the most common Quicktime CODEC.
You need to call a Mac doctor for those sick Macs. Get somebody who knows what he is doing to work with them for an hour and they will run fine after that. If people are messing with them, get a server from Apple and boot all of your Macs from one system stored on the server. It's like administering one machine, no matter how many you have. Is it perfect? No. Nothing is perfect ... these are computers. Get over it.
... what would you choose? Windows 98 can freeze up, too. It has all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of Mac OS 9.
If your IT guy is like most, he has probably spent more time avoiding learning basic Mac knowledge and troubleshooting that it takes to learn it from A to Z. It is something that he probably considers to be beneath him for some reason. He may also have worked somewhere in the past where 75% of the desktops are Windows and 25% are the Macs in the creative department, and 99.9% of the help desk calls are Windows users. Mac users tend to get left to themselves by IT guys, so it's lucky that Macs are so easy to admin.
For the record, I'm typing this on a Power Mac G3 (Blue & White) that's probably exactly the same as the one you're referring to, and I haven't even had an application crash in weeks of hard, hard use, many hours a day with monster apps like Pro Tools and Photoshop. I'm not running text editors here all day.
Yes, it sucks that it's possible to freeze Mac OS 9 with an app crash, but it's a very small price to pay for all the good stuff. Keep in mind that Mac OS 9 is still the best media OS * that's available, and second place goes to Windows 98, not WinNT/2000, which is still missing a lot of features and also media apps (the major music tools don't even run there). So for a lot of people, their work demands that they use either Windows 98 or Mac OS 9. I mean, really
* Be users should be quiet about their filesystem and call me when I can run Pro Tools and Cubase on BeOS.
Posted by BSD-Pat:
I actually have a few comments about this, and its essentially pet-peeves of mine.
FSF/GNU people think that "Open Source" is just what fits into the FSF's political agenda of "free software for all, free as in speech! not as in beer!"
Personally, I really don;t care about political agendas. Darwin is there for a couple reasons.
One, it allows developers to develop things within a the framwork of the underlying OS of MacOS X, which means you get the benefits of a wealth of UNIX related software that can run on MacOS X.
The other reason is that The OS X developers wanted alot of copperation between members of the Open Source community that they were using code from, namely Net and Free BSD projects.
Don't ever think that corporate entities release source for purely altruistic reasons.
And really, honestly, I don't care.
The other day I was in an IRC channel where someone said "What if your code was taken and used by Microsoft", as if Microsoft was evil. Personally M$ software works fine for my mother, aunts, uncles, and grandmother. It doesn't do what I want it to, so I don't use it personally (except as a gaming platform). If M$ used my BSD licensed code, I personally wouldn't care.
The difference between the GPL and the BSD license is this:
the GPL is a viral license, it has an aim, political, and parallels can be drawn to communism, theres nothing wrong with that. Communism != bad, it just means different. In certain situations, this philosophy may actually work.
the BSD license is different, the closest political view that can be drawn to it is Libertarianism. No central authority, no regulation.
The only restriction on the recent BSD licenses is "give us due credit, leave this copyright on the source code", theres no longer any advertising clause, so theres not even any penalties for not *publically* acknowledging ownership of the code.
I personally have issues with those that think we're *bad* because we don't have the political agenda that the FSF has.
Be thankful that code is there, and is given to learn, and get ideas from.
Is that kernels just arn't interesting enough. ... that's about it. Correct me if I'm wrong,
What does darwin give me that NetBSD or Linux
wouldn't? What's the difference? Well, it has
a different kernel, a NeXTStepish fs hierarchy,
and
but there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to
use Darwin, even on PPC hardware. It lacks all the
neat things OSX has, and only recently got the X
Window System ported to it. I just don't see who
would want to use Darwin over NetBSD or Linux
except for possibly people running it on a spare
box to port more traditional Unix software to
OSX.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Free software politics is irrelevant to Apple, but it is very relevant to the question posed by the slashdot article, namely, "Why isn't anyone interested in Darwin?"
A large fraction of the open source community is aware of the shortcomings of APSL as a free-software license, and at least some of these people are completely dismissing the idea of even having anything to do with Darwin development, because they know their code contributions won't be free for the public to use.
Nobody is claiming that lack of open-source community interest will hurt Darwin, or that such interest would help Darwin (look at the n years of development that have gone on with GNUstep). The question is why people don't care, not why should we care if people don't care.
Oh yeah, check out today's Stupid OS X trick. Details at MacOS X Hints.
At the office I have a quite old mac (7100) with the dreaded NUBUS so it runs only MKLinux , it does go slooowwww due to the mach kernel design ( also used in Darwin) sut it runs 24/7 when necesary. I am waiting in the mean time for a linux kernel that runs without the mach kernel on nubus macs.
On the other side all Mac-OSes are really bad programmed and really vurnable to stupid plugins that are needed for things Quicktime. The stupid part of the plugins is the fact that they have to be laden at startup. Even though these are not needed to run the system.
Except of course for Mac-OS X which is a decent unix version. Too bad though it is using Darwin on top of the Mach kernel, this architecture slows the system down remarkebly.
aXi
My god! Go to google and search! It really isn't that hard...
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Just as a correction: THose boxes were from Gil Amelio's description of Rhapsody. They still apply to OS X, though...
Blue box is now Classic application which runs OS 9 and the apps with in it.
Yellow box is now Cocoa, Apple's "preffered" tool for developers to use to build OS X apps.
Those two choices weren't enough to make developers happy, so Apple provided a 3rd choice: Carbon, so that developers with apps already built wouldn't have to rewrite their work from scratch in order to get it to run on OS X.
Never in Apple's plans have they announced anything about running Wintel binaries. One rumors site said they heard from a source that Apple was working on the "Red box" which would provide windows compatibility... But that was just a rumor site, which made that claim a year or two ago and never said a word of it afterwards.
Ehm, except that if that's not true. Apple has very little control over getting the Sorenson codecs opensourced, yes...but they could very well make a closed-source binary-only distribution of Quicktime for Linux.
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Oops... I worded that last post badly (in case I forgot my password... I'm Maktoo again)... I didn't mean that Apple has taken the 3rd party code out and released it into Darwin no... I meant Apple has taken out all 3rd Party source code (drivers mostly) from the inner workings of MacOS X PB that correlate to parts of Darwin. They have then released this "cleaned up" version of the Darwin Core of MacOS X in a binary distribution known as Darwin 1.2 However, as I said above... most of the changes that between Darwin 1.1 and 1.2 have been available to the Darwin community for many weeks thanks to the CVS system which keeps updates from the Darwin and Apple communities synched. The only CVS trees not synched regularly are the XNU trees and some others... I mentioned this above. thanks Chris (Maktoo)
Bang on! Apple's completely missed the point, and is (was, perhaps, given how low profile this is now) just riding on the Linux PR wave.
Lets say that you are a politician. Let's also say that your budget happens to have an extra billion or two in it. Do you..
a) Spend it on hiring more police to make yourself seem tough on crime.
b) Spend it on teachers to make yourself seem like you care about education.
c) Spend it on fixing the roads to make yourself seem like you care about ordinary people.
d) Give yourself a raise
e) provide for tax cuts for your campaign contributors.
f) spend it on new voting machines?
War is necrophilia.
Darwin 2.1 is the core of OS X...for an exact list of all the modules and whatnot, check out
w in/
http://www.publicsource.apple.com//projects/dar
they list everything, and you can download each part.
A pity this article was previously rejected :
:
The Register excerpt
Apple updates Darwin, asks for x86 work
By: Tony Smith
Posted: 17/11/2000 at 11:12 GMT
Apple has quietly updated its open source operating system foundation, Darwin, to version 1.2.1, and it appears to come with a plea for more work on the x86 side of things.
Darwin itself is the BSD-based core for MacOS X. The software can be downloaded free - there's a 135MB installer disk image available on Apple's Darwin Web site - and will run on any MacOS X Public Beta-compatible machine, which is pretty much all modern G3 and G4 Macs, with the exception of one or two PowerBook models.
Alongside the update, Apple has posted a Darwin 'to do' list, top of which is support for older Mac models. Then there's this:
"The Intel support in Darwin is largely dormant and hasn't been exercised much since Rhapsody. Getting Darwin installation working on Intel is the first problem. Getting it running is second. We have some experience with this; we'll need to dig up some old tools at Apple to help this get rolling."
....
Central to that is getting Darwin to run on x86 - it already compiles, just about. It can then form the basis for porting over the code unique to MacOS X, such as the Aqua UI and the Quartz PDF-based 2D graphics engine. More importantly, it would form a working system for driver writers.
....
We also note that the wish list says: "It will also be useful to get the X server running as a (rootless) client of Quartz, so that X apps can run on a Mac OS X system," part of the entry on getting Xfree86 ported over, though this is more about getting X working on PowerPC-based machines.
As far as I could tell the only advantage is that it's easy to modify "packages" after they're installed and then resynch the symlinks.
Disadvantages; fuzzy handling of upgrades, no versioning, takes forever to uninstall packages, relative hassle to install them, none of the benefits of true packages.
Personally, I love slackware packages; they're basically the same principle as stow, except with more of the advantages of packages.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
The Darwin distribution includes everything but the graphics. Install it, and you'll see everything in /bin and /usr/bin that you'd expect to see in any BSD install, plus NetInfo and a few other cool hacks.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You have to love the Mac, in the literal emotional sense, or it's just not going to work. Period. I'm running 9.0.4 on my powerbook and my G3 workstation, and the workstation, in spite of suffering under a heavy Photoshop/After Effects / Quicktime load, stopped crashing after I ditched the multiple system folders and got anything system or VM off of the SCSI drive. It goes down when I WANT it to now. Ditto the powerbook, unless you're talking useage of Napster (a shitty port if I've EVER seen one), Yahoo utilities, Real Player, or poorly implemented Java. Aside from that, they're both champs.
I also run a pair of 7100s and an iMac, all with 8.6. The 7100s take a shit with nine and run like champs with their existing systems, as long as you leave them alone and let them handle whatever it is you're making them do on their own terms. The iMac loves me. The only time the little darling has thrown a fit within the last year was when my NT-mongering, Mac-hating roommate had to use the scanner.
Ten hangs in thirty minutes. TEN.
Why? He hates them too much to figure out how to use them properly. I've been using Macs for three years, and wintel boxen for six.... I've never had any problems with either, with few, VERY few exceptions- invariably Netscape, driver conflict, or f$cked peripherals.
Either I'm really lucky, or I've learned enough about the Mac to make her sing....
Most of the problems you'll have with a Mac can be chalked up to the above reasons, or simply not having enough hands-on with the OS.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, but at least with free software, one has a chance to make a difference.
Oh good god, "True freedom." Go join the peace-corps and do something important. I find this religious attachment to free software totally silly. If you actually use the source, then by all means, more power to ya. If you do it just because it makes you feel good, and use OSS in preference to better products, then you're just stupid.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
err...ummm.. NO!!!!
This is exactly like saying that Linux is a pretty small and stable OS. The darwin project is a complete OS, and can include an X11 server. It's big claim to fame is that is is arcitecturally based on MacOS X, so it includes NetInfo, Packages (a big deal), a (heavily modified) Mac 3.0 Kernal, dual (or more) binaries, and all the other Apple/NeXT inovations.
It does not get a lot of press outside it's circles because it is geek OS that has a non-geek OS for a big brother.
/. is such narrow bandwidth for meaningful discussion. Go ahead rate this down for bashing your moderated and filtered system.
How do you expect to build a LinuxGUI like Aqua if you don't understand the importance of the engine underneath?
OK Maverick, real pioneers have already trodden the territory you're discovering for the very first time. SteveJobs used open source BSD years ago to build his NeXTOS. Darwin represents 10 years experience and a version3.0 Mach messaging system on top, this is the most exciting aspect of Darwin. Aqua GUI is only gingerbread. It like calling chrome valve covers on a hemi engine the coolest part of a racecar.
If your target is to build a competititive GUI.app learn about building an engine to power the GUI first. The fact that it is now open source is opportunity to benchmark Linux kernel against Mach kernel. It is a level GUI playing field. Learn why a messaging kernel is Aqua smooth for window event management.
-r
Obviously you're a woman, because as any guy can tell you, the getting laid is the most important part. The idea got thru well enough :)
bloody bo
I'm actually reading this in a Darwin machine (an iBook running OSX) and it's much more stable than any Win 9x box I've ever had. This is the first Mac that I've ever bought and so far the experience has been nothing but positive. Much better than an x86 box out of the box.
Apple needs to ditch this Motorola PPC crap and switch to the real Power chips.
are you kidding me? have you seen the price on those IBM Power-series chips? there's no way they're priced for the retail market, not yet anyways. they're for a totally different purpose -- intense supercomputing applications.
- j
We have, but since we don't make Intel/AMD branded hardware, we won't be selling the software. We would get millions in sales, as a secure, stable, BSD based Intel-platform OS, without any sales of hardware(currently), which means the only revenue model we could pursue would be updates and upgrades to the OS... Therefore shortchanging the R&D and development innovations of a floppy-less iMac, the FireWire enabled devices, the Airport capable systems, the long-battery life portables, the fanless designs, etc.
actually in most Apple-geek circles this isn't believe to be what's in the minds of the people at Apple.
sure Apple is never going to make OS X run on generic Intel-based boxen, but that doesn't rule out Apple selling its own x86-based hardware
now it isn't going to please any slashdot geeks, but if/when Apple does move to x86, MacOS X will probably only run on Apple-made hardware. the design could then be based around 'cheap' PC components, including AMD/Intel chips, but the computers could be well-designed and controlled by Apple to a certain extent to avoid the plethora of support issues in supporting every x86 box ever created.
this all makes a lot more business sense when you realise that Motorola has very little interest in the desktop processor market. the PowerPC has been and probably always will be designed for the embedded market. and in embedded boxes, 500Mhz is plenty. as Intel and AMD hit 2Ghz in the near future, it will actually become faster to run "Classic" (MacOS 9) applications under PowerPC emulation on a fast x86 than on a 500Mhz G4 for programs that aren't Altivec enhanced.
it would be a shame to see Apple move away from the PowerPC, as it is a nice architecture (especially Altivec!), but with Motorola's lack of commitment to the desktop market it's become increasingly difficult to justify keeping it.
but anyhow, only time will tell
- j
My bad, i have a bad memory (this info is like 5+ years old, and being that i'm only 20, that's a substantial portion of my life)
y .html) (God rests it's pages)
the cool thing about rhapsody, is that you could use the yellow box to create rhapsody programs for windows95, etc, without having to do a re-compile, or get an actual wintel machine to do the devel, and testing. This also allowed for 90-95% same code for the mac and the window app (just change some of the front end, but i think that is redundant, just write the code in ansi compliant c or whathaveyou) Link from MacUser (http://macuser.zdnet.com/mu_0897/startup/rhapsod
Wait a gosh durn minute here....I believe that is one of the major points of OSX. Support for Wintel applications natively. IIRC that is the yellow box (Alas, no source code, however it is an intrigal part of the OS, so it will be pretty well supported). OSX (as much as i want it to be on intel chips) is pretty much designed for PPC, being the blue box (Apple) and yellow box (wintel) compatiblilty. Altho, the BSD based kernel is sweet, and I figure that would allow for almost instantainous linux/bsd/gnu compatiblity (just need to re-compile, or even just run the prog)
dammit, reading the comments, but not the story, ignore the above comment...:P
But other than that, the GUI, and everything else sitting on top of it is purely OS X, and not open source, right?
Is the kernel/non-kernel basically the line of division between Darwin and OS X?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
MODERATE THIS UP!!!!! He's hit it right on the head here.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
And while he's looking perhaps you could take a gander at this.
Pete
The big thing I was trying to get at is that to program an interface may be easy, but the thinking behind how an interface should work and why is actually extremely involved and difficult.
That's why Microsoft, in spite of having zillions of dollars, is still having a hard time getting their UIs to match those of (pick one) Apple, Be, Gnome, KDE... .
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
In fact, there's an entire discipline devoted to interface development, and the people who developed the graphical user interface over the years may have a little something to do with the personal computer revolution and the rise of the Internet.
But perhaps we should go back to the good old days, when there were no "pretty fountains" and it was just the command line. No pesky web sites with all those pesky maps, movies, and other nuisances!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Why use Darwin when you can use FreeBSD. X had Aqua so there is a reason to use it. Why develop software for Apple to get rich on and get nothing in return? Do I look stoopid? Do I smell bad? Huh?
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence -- and then success is sure. Mark Twain
I run linux on an iBook, I got a hold of the public beta a couple weeks ago and ran it on my iBook for a couple weeks to get a feel for what OSX 1.0 might be like as an alternative to using Linux. All of the pretty things that you would expect from Aqua are...you guessed it pretty. It's nice having such a cute desktop, but I have some issues with the software on the BSD side they chose to include...most importantly no gcc! Now I know I just could have run out and compiled it, but seriously. Also the load times for EVERYTHING were really bad, up to 15 seconds to load a terminal window sometimes, and that's one of the faster loading apps. The GUI was cool, I liked the dock and all but when it came down to getting work done I must say I found ol' Yellow Dog Linux to be the easy choice. OSX has a long way to go IMHO
I only post twice a year, who needs a sig?
So are hostile AC's who can't sign their own names.
Beg pardon??? I'll have you know we Americans descend from people who have been kicked out of some of the finest countries of Europe. So there.
What I'd really like to see is a Quartz/Aqua port for Intel and nVidia, so my geForce can power that nifty-looking eye candy...
Apple's original Rhapsody plan didn't get warmly received by some of the major cross platform developers, (Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, etc.) Rhapsody allowed easy cross-platform development. (with its yellowbox DLL's for windows), but these companies already had a cross platform development strategy. If they had to throw away their old MacOS code to work on the new Mac platform, they probably wouldn't have replaced it with OS-X's frameworks, they would have dropped mac support entirely.
So Apple came up with the idea for Carbon, a MacOS subset that could run on OS-X. And since they had this strategy to keep the cross platform developers through MacOS support, there was little need for Apple to offer the yellowbox on intel DLLs to coax Windows developers.
So no intel based frameworks. Unfortunatly.
That's interesting. Some OS X software I've installed was released in .pkg format, which is essentially another type of bundle, just like .app or .kext. I was poking through the guts of the system, and found some .pkg installer receipts, documenting what went where and so on, so there is obviously such a system for OS X. I'm surprised that this isn't being released as part of Darwin, since other sorts of bundles are.
When you download these packages, they are tarballs, but since a bundle is a directory with a specified format / internal hierarchy, all you have to do is untar them, and you have a .pkg installer (or whatever type of bundle).
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
'Bundles' seem to be a formalized example of a common Unix system administration practice. My Unix admin experience is pretty much limited to the University environment, but in these situations at least, typically any 3rd party software is manhandled into its own directory, labelled with version numbers, and then made a part of the system with the absolute minimum number of symlinks (this is of course much easier if one has the source! many commercial packages don't play nice and want to extend their hooks into every nook and cranny.)
One immediate advantage is that packages can be exported over the network or easily rsynced between machines, allowing for much more straight-forward software updates and distribution. Appropriate use of configure's exec-prefix, localstatedir and such makes this sort of configuration a breeze for packages which use configure :)
Everytime I wish to update a piece of software on my home machine(s) that was installed off the distribution as an RPM, it is installed in such a manner and the old RPM removed. RPM database corruption does happen, and it really sucks. My home system is now in mid-migration to Linux From Scratch, which should allow the avoidance of RPM problems entirely.
While I'm not offended about the Windows ME comment, I do happen to like it quite a bit :) It's my main OS and it runs very well. And I won't be leaving any site, thanks :)
it was the same way in 18th century US.
I dunno, I kind of wanted to prove my 133tness early by going hardcore with one of the BSD's now so I can be extra 133t when linux gets more mainstream.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
1 - He failed to mention a few key points. The major one being this: Darwin doesn't have nearly the user base that Linux does. I mean shit...how can he expect to see a huge hype when Darwin has a user base of say....1000 people (MacOS X excluded) and Linux has a userbase of 100,000.
2- Also...Linux is a full blown OS. Darwin is a KERNEL! It isn't designed to have the same hype as the release of Linux 2.3. I'd say that our author is putting a lot of demands on this open source kernel. No one said that making it open source should warrant the same kind of hype that linux demands.
3 - It has no bundled software with it. As I said earlier, it is just a KERNEL! Who ever wrote that article needs to lay off the crack. It isn't designed to have a windowing system, it is merely a system for developers to code versions of their drivers into the Darwin kernel. It wasn't designed to draw a huge hoopala when it releases version 2.
So suck on my balls Mr. Uneducated article writer...you are an ass clown.
But why?
I couldn't care less about the "open source community". When there is a useful piece of open souce code e.g. Apache, I'll build on top of it. When the best code is closed source i'll use that.
Why in hell should I feel compelled to contribute? Free labor is great as long as I'm getting paid. If people want to work for free let 'em, but why should I "give something back"?
I doubt Apple will port and sell OSX to Intel anytime soon. Apple gets most of its money through hardware sales, not OS sales. If people could run OSX on Intel/AMD machines with no problems, why would they buy a Mac?
OK, so you're obliged to give back your modifications to Apple. This doesn't make this stuff copylefted! Copylefted has got the underlying idea that code has got no owner. So-called "strong" copyleft adds "should stay Free" restrictions to this.
As this code never was anything near Free, it is far from copylefted. It's available under a restricted source code license, that's all.
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
If you want to go above-and-beyond the call of l33tness, just become a commandline commando. :)
After all, gui's are for wimps, right?
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
}
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
I install and uninstall software everyday. No way in hell I'm dealing with all these symlinks
/appl/foo-v123 then any and all symlinks pointing to it will become invalid. It isn't hard to find and remove invalid symlinks (provided you don't have any that point to removable media which may or may not be online when the cron job runs, otherwise they're toast too).
When you rm -rf
"(I'm also quite curious to see how the fervor-filled Linux community -- such as it is -- will behave as Linux continues evolving into being less and less the underdog. Will the zealots embrace and support the next worthy underdog, or gloat about how l337 they have become?)" In my opinion... YES! :)
Not to make this a flamefest, just putting out facts. GB wasn't the only one doing that. In america, non-whites couldn't vote at all until after the Civil war, late 19th century, and poll taxes and other nasty tricks kept most disenfranchised until post civil rights, late 20th century.
Women couldn't vote until 1920, early 20th century.
That being said, we're using ancient 60's technology to vote (as a Chicagoan, I can say that Illinois is still using the butterfly system so heavily deriled in FLorida). Kinda weird that something as important as the President would be left to ancient tech. I just hope that we use Florida as a learning experience and fix the problems.
-1, Offtopic
Because that's how they're going to make money (of all things)?
Yes - they can try and make money selling OSX if they'd like, I have no problems as long as they operate reasonably and responsibly to their community (citizens and customers).
I think we have to wait a little bit to see how 'honest' and 'open' Apple really gets with OSX. If they open it to be Free (gratis and/or libre) remains to be seen - as far as i can tell their goals are neither at this point.
I mean, you're getting a fully-functioning OS for free (sans an X server). And if you're a Mac developer, you're much better off now.
I understand you can write Apps for Mac that dont require a GUI - but Macs are more clearly a workstation machine (mostly, and *nix would be shown to be a Non-GUI server environment (mostly)). Are you suggesting that Darwin will enable Mac developers to build server apps?
Wouldnt they really be better off building ontop of *nix?
Would you rather they have not released any source at all?
Absolutely not - but I think Apple has 'a long way to go' in making OSX really open - and Im really hoping they do. I dont think they are being completely honest.
And besides - If the Cube becomes more reasonably priced, and they make OSX libre and gratis - it may just be the first Apple box I own... otherwise Ill stick to Linux/BSD on x86.
Original release from apple note last line! What could it mean??? Oh im so excited my nipples are hardening.
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Darwin 1.2.1, which is synchronized with the version used in Mac OS X Public Beta. A binary installer is downloadable from http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin, and is built using the same sources that have been available in CVS since the Public Beta release. We are looking to the community to create CD-based distributions if there is a demand for this.
This release includes support for new Mac hardware, including SMP machines. It has also been compiled fat for use with Intel machines, but currently there is no Intel installer.
--------
get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
Why? Well why should there be a lot of Interest in Darwin?
I can't judge if Darwin is technically very advanced or not because i haven't bothered to inform myself(which doesn't matter because I'm not a Developer). Why should I? I think the other Open Source Unices(yes I know Darwin is only the kernel) are already drawing the attention of Open Source Developers to them.
Why should someone bother to help Apple when they can help the effort of for example the OpenBSD folks.
Apple is releasing under a License which a lot of people might find to restrictive.
I'm not saying that Darwin is better or worse, but I just think that other Projects could use support much more than Darwin because they actually rely on Volunteers much more then the Apple paid Darwin
The question everybody asks is how much is Apple(speaking of the company, meaning Managment not the Developers) really in to Open Source? Are they really trying to give something to the community or are they just trying to gain publicity and free code?
Is it such a great new thing Apple is giving out here? Or is it just two wellknown concepts(Mach and BSD) thrown together?
The bas thing is that the fact that Darwin is not getting much attention might hold other companies from persuing Open Source Strategies
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
'nuf said
What is Darwin doing about Apple?
sulli
RTFJ.
Well, if you'd read any of the history about early years of the PC industry, you'd know that Jobs is a jackass and will do anything to make picture perfect product, downright to creating two teams and making them compete. Every time he has the favorite. Somehow it seems that OSX is his favorite... Just don't forget the history kids, look it repeating already!
It seems to me that "splitting the difference" between the desktop and server is going to be a problem for Darwin. I'm not a Level 9 SysAdmin or anything, but everyone seems to be saying the same thing: Darwin needs to deliver innovative features on multiple platforms before the command-line set will get interested in using it and supporting it. There needs to be an advantage to using Darwin over other *NIXes, and software development for OSX just isn't it.
I have to say from the user end, the whole Aqua re-design really turns me off. They seem to have forgotten every UI lesson they've ever learned. I mean, sure, it LOOKS nice, but the goofy bells and whistles that are going to make it LESS efficient just make me want to see another "skin" available for OSX... preferably OS9 (and yes, I know you can run apps in OS9 "in" OSX, but it that's not what I'm talking about). So I doubt geeks will be drawn to Darwin for the chance to use Aqua.
The addition of Java 2, Display PDF, etc. is good though. And having a full-screen terminal is fine by me. There is promise, and I like Apple (since before '84), but they have to raise the bar further on this OS if they want to make a splash.
Obviously there aren't any REAL programmers in here.
.. read the CVS instructions and read about how it is possible for outsiders to checkin code. Then you can go fix the two month old code that you seem to think there is. Or wait .. can't you program ?
For the latest versions of Darwin use the CVS.
I'm quite sure that both PB and Darwin teams would be using the same codebase.
I HATE clueless people that quote ZDNet (please) of all news sources. Goto http://publicsource.apple.com
The same arguments could be used for Mozilla.
Funtage Factor: Purple
Too hard ? If everyone was like you there would be no Linux. The spirit of open source was that if something was too hard, you ask a bunch of people and together you work it out. Everyone learns from the experience. I am saddened if you can't even install a *nix OS without a wonderful graphical install program. Learn goddam it, ask questions, try.
Funtage Factor: Purple
Bundles, Frameworks, NetInfo, and XML are all included in Darwin.
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Not just an app, but lots of things are bundles. Frameworks (headers, libs, and related files) are bundles, so are KEXTs (kernel extensions), startup items, and other stuff.
BTW Linux people don't like organization so expect to be flamed
---
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
>but given the 700MHz difference in clock for comparably priced processors
Can you buy a 1.2GHz Athlon for $150?
The problem isn't with the PowerPC, it's with Apple. I believe Motorola sells a 550MHz G4 for $150. IBM also has a 750MHz version (minus Altivec) that they're selling for under $150. Those are reasonable prices considering how well they perform when compared to say a 700MHz P3. I'm not saying the PowerPC is the fastest chip out there - just that it is priced well compared to the competition. This is especially true if you look at the lower speeds (400MHz~$75.)
I would love to be able to buy a PC with PowerPC chips in place of 8x86. I might have to buy 2, or even 4 CPUs to place in the motherboard but the performance would be great running Linux. With their low power requirements they wouldn't require any CPU fans (or even a bigger power supply.) This fact alone is a selling point for those wanting a quiet + reliable system. (I can't count the number of CPU fans I've replaced. I've even seen some CPUs burn up due to broken fans. This reminds me of early IBM pentium systems - they had no CPU fans and were very reliable!! )
The PowerPC is a great CPU and is the leader in it's class. Things will become even more interesting when the new G4e is released in January. Don't blame the PowerPC for mistakes made by Apple - it's actually a great CPU.
Willy
>The IBM Power chips are far more advanced than the half-assed Motorola chips Apple is using. and that's why IBM is not playing with Apple and Motorola anymore - Motorola just doesn't give a shit, and didn't care to make improvements where IBM's architects saw fit.
Ahh, have you not discovered that different applications have different requirements? Is it not possible that Motorola is designing their chips for the people that actually buy them - the embeded market? Seriously though, how many CPU designs run at 500MHz with a four stage pipeline and are as powerful as a G4? Even without looking at power consumption or manufacturing costs there still is nothing that can touch a PowerPC (except possibly the StrongARM.) The P4 is designed for speed and has a 20 stage pipeline. It also costs a ton to produce and draws ~50w of power.
If you were building a cable modem what CPU would you consider more advanced?
Willy
Apple has a great model available for creating device drivers. I don't write them myself but I know people who do and they like it. All the docs + sample code are available on their web page.
Is there any development infrastructure besides a mailing list (see Mozilla's array of bugtracker, newsgroups, CVS, daily builds, docs, and so on.)
I don't have the web address handy but Apple does have a bug tracking page for Darwin. All known bugs are posted and assigned to various Apple engineers. I'm sure you could even eMail them if you wanted an update on the status of the fix or if you wanted to submit a new fix of your own.
Nobody's really going to care about NFS performance or mounting 200 different filesystems or whatever Linux-kernel people are worried about. And the consumer version won't even have a term window, so forget about classic Unix userspace stuff.
You're right about people not caring if it isn't the fastest OS on server tasks. Like any other OS, this will improve with age. But about the terminal window, I read a quote from Steve Jobs where he stated that the terminal app will be present in the final version. Not on the main desktop but it'll still be there.
Willy
(end comment) */ }
(end comment) */ }
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
What does make a user OS a user OS?
First, its GUI. MacOS X does have one, no matter if you like it (I do).
Second, its applications. There are lots of user applications available (Soundjam, Omniweb, PowerMail, Napster, Caracho...), and many more will be released (Photoshop, Office, Mathematica...).
Just because a user OS uses the same kernel as a server OS doesn't make it bad. It's even better, because the user OS is as stable as a server.
Have you any idea how much those processors cost? And how much heat they put out. They are not desktop CPUs by any stretch of the imagination. You'd need to do some serious modifying of the processors to make them suitable for putting in a desktop machine's case, and I suspect you'd end up with something very similar, if not identical to the PPCs.
He he he©©©That's not funny! Well only the Cartoon 2 in my case but Cartoon 1 is odd because Wigs are people who hide themselfs but they truly are something on the outside© People who want to mix races that's them©
P©S: This is a back dude and I don't care for stuff like this© Hell I save Cartoon 2 on my hardrive© =
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
I bet there would be a lot more interesting articles then some of the ones that do get posted.
AC comments get piped to
This moron is moderated UP ?!
What is happening to /. ? Fact-free, FUD-full posts get moderated up.
Taken from a darwin-dev post by Strobe Anarkhos: What can Darwin offer that *BSD and Linux can't?
1) Darwin is more organized from top to bottom. From drivers to solving the /etc/ chaos
2) Darwin is a macrokernel with less maintenance. No module recompiling.
3) Bundles bundles bundles
4) Potentially faster than FreeBSD
5) Automatic kext loading
6) NetInfo
7) IOKit driver architecture
8) More flexible BSD-like license
9) Corporate support
10) Mach-O binaries. dyld memory use efficiency. FAT binaries
Why use Darwin when you can use FreeBSD.
Or windows, or BeOS or CP/M. Darwin has a microkernel, FreeBSD does not. That itself makes it an object of interest, at least. Linus notwithstanding, a kernel hacker can lear a lot from running darwin.
X had Aqua so there is a reason to use it.
X has Aqua, does it? Here, pull my finger.
Why develop software for Apple to get rich on and get nothing in return?
Why develop software for RedHat, Corel, Caldera, etc and get nothing in return? OSS software is OSS software. Deal with it. (Not that you, personally, would develop anything other toner smudges on your fingers.)
Do I look stoopid?
Well, you arent entirely the brightest bulb on the christmas tree.
--
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Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.
There is no reason not to open source the kernel because no one writes to the kernel. (Even NT apps are almost all entirely Win32, an api on top of the NT kernel.) It doesnt matter whether its open source or not. The OS X, api's are another matter entirely, however. They may not be able to keep a lid under posix, but they as hell can - AND WILL - keep carbon and all the other apis strictly proprietary.
Again, something no one programs directly is a free lunch.
--
--
Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.
Who said apple wants os x on the x86? Steve Jobs touts apple's major advantage as being able to control the entire user experience, including hardware. When you put a great OS on some Future Power crap the whole idea of user experience is moot. Reading the comments of linux users here on /. , it strikes me how hard it is for them to grasp intangibles that apple apparently focuses on so much.
I don't know much about Darwin, but I think it is probably a pretty small and stable piece of the OS. If that's true, it doesn't get changed much, and therefore doesn't get any media coverage.
What exactly are you trying to say, you fucking limey shitstain?
Yum
The main problem that Darwin faces is that at a corporate level, Apple treats it in the most opportunistic way possible. Any time Steve Jobs wants to ride on the open source wave, he pulls out his presentation slide that says "Linux-like," and that makes a big impression. It did, anyway, as long as there was no Mac OS Public Beta for the masses to swoon over.
I dont realy care for apple myself; however, I still prefer Apple's graphics over PC. I am a PC user and plan to stay that way, The problem with most operating systems that are not enough software manufactures producing the software for each Operating System. PC gammers absolutely have an overall advantage when buying software and I doubt that it will change. Flying monkies made me write it!!!
Sounds exactly like bundles, except that you can't double-click on the folder to open the app (it sounds like you have to dig into the hierarchy).
Cool system, regardless. I just see Bundles as a further refinement of it.
----------
You're wrong and I'll correct you.
Besides an easy RTFM fireball I could throw at you, here's what Darwin is: a package. A wrapper. A collection of things tied up in one nifty, cudly handle.
What's inside is the following:
A MACH (3.0) kernel
A FreeBSD/NetBSD Unix layer
NetInfo directory service
HFS, AppleTalk and other Mac-specific layers
USB, FireWire and other drivers
QuickTime Streaming Server
Get the full list of things contained in Darwin.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
We have stuff like FreeBSD binary support etc. for Linux/Intel. So how long, I wonder, before someone figures out how to bring OS X binary support to PPC Linux?
Breakfast served all day!
If you're developing software for Mac OS X, it's a lot easier to get stuff done if you can read the Darwin source. It's also a bonus for Apple that more eyes on the source means that deep bugs are dug out and fixed faster.
If your criteria for judging the success of Darwin is the number of publicly-traded companies selling packages containing plastic discs with Darwin code printed on them, then you're going to be REALLY missing the point.
jhw
Does anyone remember this Macworld article: "Apple Goes Open Source with Mac Server: Surprise move will adcelerate [sic] Mac OS development efforts"? I think the following quote really sets the tone of Apple's relationship with the open source community.
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
I can only hope for Apple's sake that Ernie was terribly misquoted or that he's the only one at Apple who feels this way. But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community, I fear that my hopes are unfounded.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich. And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way. As long as Darwin is nothing more than an enabler for Apple's proprietary Mac OS X, the vast majority of the open source community doesn't really benefit from helping out.
I used to think more highly of Apple. It appears that they are merely joining the herds who are attempting to cash in on open source without joining our community.
This isn't really the case.
I recommend everyone here to join the Darwin-Users or Darwin-Dev mailing lists if they are interested.
If you read those mailing lists, you will understand that the vast majority of the code that is in the *CVS* repositories available for Darwin is exactly what the Apple employees are working on *right now*. IIRC the only directories that aren't synched daily are the "xnu" (kernel) trees. This is because many of the drivers that Apple has internally are 3rd party, and thus are not available to be released into the Open Source community.
What Apple has done with Darwin 1.2 is finally taken out and approved all the 3rd party code that was in OS X PB and released it into the Darwin community as a new Binary. The sources have actually been there almost since PB was released.
There is a wonderful amount of work being done on Darwin. Mainly focusing on getting it to boot/run on Intel and older PPC machines. There's also some work going into the X system.
Amen to that. I'm really hoping OSX will lead to a surge of interest in GNUstep. It's a beautiful system that, alas, hasn't ever seen much mindshare.
I don't know about making GNUstep look like OSX-- though a good theming architecture is something the developers will be looking into someday-- but at least they have rolled in some of Apple's changes to the OpenStep API, selectable via #ifdef MACOSX (IIRC).
There has, however, been talk about possible bad blood with Apple. Steve Jobs has been quoted in the past as saying, "We will vigorously protect our IP w.r.t. NeXT/OpenStep," and if GNUstep makes it possible to build Cocoa apps off of OSX, Apple might see a benefit in squashing the project.
I don't think that in itself is too likely, because it's kind of ridiculous to sue for a rogue implementation of your API (as long as they don't call it OpenStep, of course). Some patent issues have been brought up, however, w.r.t. database interfaces in OpenStep's Enterprise Object Framework (EOF). These are important because the EOF is one of the biggest plusses of the OpenStep standard, as I've heard. (Supposedly makes writing database-capable apps incredibly easy. Not being a DB guy myself, I have to take this at face value)
Personally, I'm hoping some kind of amicable arrangement can happen between Apple and GNUstep. Doesn't have to be official, doesn't have to require any of their resources, only a tacit agreement that GNUstep's and Apple's interests are not opposed to each other's. Considering Apple has the power to change their interface to break implementation compatibity a la MS, such an arrangement would prove invaluable, both to GNUstep and to the integrity of the OpenStep/Cocoa API definition.
iSKUNK!
The way I see it: OSX's most exciting parts are the GUI.
Sort of. Another angle is that it's a Unix OS that actually runs Mac apps with close to zero speed penalty and tight integration.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Sorry... I missed this part in my other post:
Why must the OpenSource movement do the 'support' coding of Darwin while Apple keeps the GUI closed Source?
Because that's how they're going to make money (of all things)?
here is Apple (or someone speaking in their interest) saying "Why arent you guys helping us build Darwin?"
In Apple's defense, they haven't officially bitched about lack of support. This is just a ZDNet column. I think Apple's just fine with the community doing whatever they want with Darwin. I don't think they feel the community really owes them anything (except making their own CDs). Sure it's not exactly what you want, but it's a huge step in the right direction. They've gone a a lot further than Microsoft or Sun has. I mean, you're getting a fully-functioning OS for free (sans an X server). And if you're a Mac developer, you're much better off now.
Would you rather they have not released any source at all?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
This is just a soundbyte so the press knows how do deal with the information. Remember where you took the article from: Macworld. Macworld readers don't care about stuff like licenses and kernels (although this printed as well).
But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community
Yeah, they've only given you an open source OS, an open source streaming media server, OpenPlay, NetSprocket and released it all under a license approved by the OSI. Oh, and one of their employees does work on Apache.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich.
If you really want commercial companies to release open source software on an ongoing basis, there has to be a balance in the expectations. It's silly to come down on Apple because they want to make money. They have shareholders. But at the same time, I don't think Apple really expects Darwin to "make [them] rich."
There are a variety of reasons Apple decided to do Darwin, but one of them is that Apple's VP of Engineering, Avie Tevanian (remember? one of the guys who wrote Mach, which was later given to the FSF?) felt that Apple should give something back to the community.
And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
I don't see how any of this is possible based on the license. If you do, please share. Yes, they copy things from Darwin and paste them in OSX, but they cannot cut things from Darwin entirely and put them only in Mac OS X. You and the community get to keep everything you make forever.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way.
You make it sound as if Apple is complaining about the level of support Darwin has received. They are not.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Having used Aqua for a couple days, I have to agree with you. It sucks. It is so damn slow compared to just about anything else I've tried in recent memory.
This has nothing to do with Aqua (as a theme) and everything to do with debugging code and incompete video drivers (and other display components). I imagine KDE and GNOME didn't have to go through this phase since X11 does it for them.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I have 64MB of RAM, which was not the point I intended to make, Gnome/Sawfish on the same hardware does a much better job as far as speed goes. [...] It's not that I have this much RAM or that much, the point is what is OSX doing that requires so much extra time?
OSX is still in beta. The goal is to get the realistic minimum down to 64MB from the current 128MB. But that's not really the point. The point is this:
Get Darwin and an X server. Install gnome. I bet at this point, the terminal windows and MP3 player will open pretty damn fast on your 64MB iBook. So why not use just Darwin with X? Probably because you want QuickTime, Quartz, Carbon apps, Classic compatibility, font and color management, AppleScript, Java 2 support, GameSprockets, OpenGL, Cocoa APIs and everything else that Mac users and developers are expecting. So where do all of these things live? If they won't fit in milk bottles, then you're going to have to put them in ram.
If you want Mac OS X to work just like Linux + gnome/sawmill, you might as well use Darwin. But if you want all the functionality and mainstream apps that Mac OS currently enjoys, then you're going to have the resources to accomodate them. As I said before, optimization will take place before the 1.0 product ships, but it's probably not going to match a bare-bones GNOME/Sawmill/Linux installation.
And I don't agree that including GCC would make users feel compelled to compile everything? When was the last time you recompiled everything in Linux? I know I have compiled parts (X, Mozilla, etc.), but it does not mean that I have to compile X myself.
I think we're just going fundamentally disagree on this. I think having compilers installed (or even on the same CD) makes it too easy for developers to say "just compile it yourself," which just isn't an option for most current Mac users. I think it's safe the say that Jobs' people from NeXT have some experience in this area.
You can get a ton of dev tools for free from http://apple.com/developer/, including compilers, an IDE (Project Builder), a RAD app (Interface Builder), a Java class browser and plenty of other goodies. The total disk image is 66MB. Or for $200, they'll send you CDs every month for a year with everything you need to write software.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
One thing that I've never seen in the OSX reviews (and I have read most if not all that I've come across) is a feature-by-feature list of things shared between OSX and Darwin. Does anybody that has played with both (or just Darwin) care to make a stab at it?
I am most interested in things like the Frameworks concept, bundles (i.e. ".app" directories) from the NeXT world, NetInfo and of course, XML configuration.
I don't really care about Aqua, Java support or Display PDF. All those are nice toys but I just want a clean, 21st century Unix, and Darwin looks like the best contender...
I don't understand your post. Are you suggesting OSX supports the
Win32 API? I'm afraid that's not the case: the best it does is it's
virtual PC mode, which is more the equivalent of VMware, and isn't
really all that interesting. I heard some talk of porting WINE to the
OSX a while back, though...
Illiterate welfare mothers have just as much right to vote as snobby technology dweebs. Its the governments job to bend over backwards to make sure everyone can vote. If you don't like that, go back to 18th centry Great Britain, where only land-owning adult white males could vote.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Let's see. a 1Ghz Athlon performs at least half as well as an Alpha 21264, and I haven't seen any of those for $350 including motherboard. PPC might be great clock for clock, but given the 700MHz difference in clock for comparably priced processors, its not catching up with X86 anytime soon. Not to mention the fact that a 1.2GHz Athlon is not only a lot faster, but for the same price as a PPC machine, it makes MUCH better configured. (Easily double the RAM, a GeForce2Ultra, and a larger harddrive, better DVD decoder, etc.) As for Sun, I'm still waiting for it to come within half the price/performance ratio of a 1.2GHz Athlon w/ GeForce2 Ultra. x86 might be inelegant, but RISC carries not only a reasonable premium, but enough of one that puts it out of the reach of most people.
PS> And no, I will not use an older Alpha that performs 70% as well as an Athlon just so I'm not using Intel.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, last I recalled the POWER chips are WAY out of the consumer league. Some of the chips are (were) as big as Poloriods! (4096mm^2 die size! Yikes!)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, people aren't being forced to use WMA. They use it because it is free and whoops everything except DivX and Sonorson in the quality department in high bandwidth streams. For low bandwidth streams, it doesn't get much better than WMA (depending on the type of video of course.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's a great idea... except for the fact that it is painstaking. I install and uninstall software everyday. No way in hell I'm dealing with all these symlinks (or learning how to use something like Encap, which is way to complex for a relativly simple job!) to install software. BeOS has probably the best idea on how to manage software. All apps are contained in a folder (kinda like NeXTStep) It is just a regular folder (no hacks like bundles) and can be moved at will. Local libraries are local to the app. Anything installed in appdir/lib or appdir/add-on is automatically searched out. Configuration could use work (right now it consists of a bunch of text and binary files jammed into /boot/home/config/settings) but overall, adding and removing BeOS software is scary simple. Just the way it should be.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Huh? Even the HURD project agrees that there are better microkernels than Mach to use. They use a custom version of Mach4, so yea, I would say Mach3 is antiquated. And wrapper around, Mach3 is FreeBSD 3.2, which runs in kernel space so it doesn't have to use messaging. What the hell are you talking about?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
In general, I tend not to like anything like bundles that have a different UI representation from the actual, physical representation. As such, I don't like UI tricks like the .hidden files. Its just matter of personal preference, but I must say that in general, BeOS apps are right under the top level directory. Another nifty thing is that there is a feature that allows apps to be launched by app-sig, so apps can be moved around, and no app-dependency linkes will break.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually I used Great Britain, because in general, people in the US didn't have the notion that the aristocracy or middle calss are the only people with rights.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
1) Darwin is more organized from top to bottom. From drivers to solving the /etc/ chaos
>>>>>>>>>>>
Okay, I have to give that to you. But organization is not enough to save an OS. It is nice though.
2) Darwin is a macrokernel with less maintenance. No module recompiling.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
QNX, BeOS, and Windows don't need module recompiling. Hell, DOS loads its drivers dynamically.
3) Bundles bundles bundles
>>>>>>>>>
Yea, a nice UI features, but it is only slightly better than the BeOS or MacOS "one folder, one app" paradigm.
4) Potentially faster than FreeBSD
>>>>>>>>>>
How? It is basically FreeBSD 3.2 wrapped around Mach. Mach is far from fast (its messaging is particularly slow) and there IS overhead involved by negotiating the two systems.
5) Automatic kext loading
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sorry, I'm not familiar wit kext.
6) NetInfo
>>>>>>>>>>
That's a user-space tool. I'm fairly sure something similar could be made for any other OS.
7) IOKit driver architecture
>>>>>>>
Again, I'm not too familiar with the driver architecture, could you elaborate?
8) More flexible BSD-like license
>>>>>>>>>>
Darwin's license is MORE restrictive than FreeBSD's!
9) Corporate support
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, Darwin is unsupported OSS software.
10) Mach-O binaries. dyld memory use efficiency. FAT binaries
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
I'm not familiar with dyld, but again, Mach-) and FAT binaries are nice, but not really a great salient point of the OS. Also, multiple-arch support really isn't a wide-spread issue. If anything, people will prefer to download i386 or PPC only versions to save the bandwidth.
Given the limitations of Darwin, the above-mentioned features are nifty, but they're really just something cool that might get a passing glance, not something that really makes the OS better.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Sounds alot like stow. I haven't played around with it though, but it looks like its been around forever.
And how big an audience would that reach? I am not only refering to the size of the Linux market, but the fact that there are so many binary forms of Linux out there, that Apple would be forced to pick just one version on one platform (for example RedHat 7 on Intel) to support. And what would everyone do then, scream at them for not suporting their effort to get Linux on a Toaster running... And where would this benifit Apple, who is a company after all, and would probably have to pay all those Codec writers another fee to add another platform to the contract (because the orriginal contracts never included Linux.. only MacOS and Windows). They are already having enough problems getting third party drivers added into MacOS X because the third parties want more money for the right to re-compile these drivers, and this is even a bigger issue on the Darwin side.
You forget what I think is the most impressive feature of bundles: how to handle library code.
As well as installing library bundles in a central location, application bundles (not sure about other types) can contain library code in their bundle. When an application loads a library that is installed both locally and system-wide, the most recent version (using real version numbers, not just dates) is loaded. The downside is a lot of redundant library code stored in bundles, but a few megs of HD space is worth it to avoid DLL-hell. (Plus, I'm sure someone will come out with a bundle optimizer that will remove unnecessary bits like that.)
All this, of course, is to facilitate one of the oldest and nicest paradigms of Macintosh: to install an application you copy it to your hard disk, to uninstall it you drag it to the trash. When I first started using DOS, I was astounded at all the pointless individual files that cluttered up each directory. I had no idea what the file was for (8.3 names didn't help) or what would break if it were erased. On Macs, it was rare to find a file that you didn't know where it came from (creator codes are cool that way). But this was in 1991, around about System 7.5 the extensions folder started balooning like mad. Apple wants to return sanity to file system management, and I like it.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Darwin is a case in point. Apple is clearly feeling the Open Source waters. If you were Steve Jobs, would you say, "Hmm, we've spent literally thousands of man-years on developing the technology behind the MacOS and our NeXT tools. I think we should just give this stuff away for free and make *that* the main thrust of our OS effort!"
Uhh.. not likely. Apple has finite resources. One thing that continually amazes me is that people seem to think that a large computer company has infinite resources to throw at any given technical challenge. The reality is that even an Open Source effort like Darwin requires time and money. Even more important, and scarce, is human capital.
The fact is, Apple can't trust an Open Source effort with their flagship software at this point. The entire future of Apple is at stake. It may be feasible to pull Darwin and OS X onto the same track at some point, but to expect that in the midst of a make or break project, Apple is going to siphon off extra effort for Darwin is just not realistic.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
And there I am, the FIRST in this whole Linux zealot community forum that simply clarifies: "because it's not Open Source".
Now that you all got nice Free click-and-drool GUI systems you suddenly have completely forgotten about the ideals that got you there in the first place. While *I* think that now that you actually _can_ point and drool with Linux, people would become more reluctant to demand true Freedom.
You wrote:
The political rationalle behind "free" software doesn't really enter into Apple's reasons for releasing Darwin, so don't look for one, or even complain about Darwin not being free enough to satisfy you.
And earlier on, you wrote:
And it's been what, 5-10 years, that work on GNUStep has been going on? How far along is it? Can it do any of the things which separate Mac OS X from NextStep? Will it ever?
To which I can only respond:
The business rationale behind "finished" software doesn't really enter into GNU's reasons for releasing GNUStep, so don't look for one, or even complain about GNUStep not being finished enough to satisfy you. Never ever complain about Free Software, it's written without wanting anything from you in return. Just use it, or don't.
And I'll complain about propietary software whenever I want, thank you very much. Especially when it's misleadingly disguised as Open Source.
BTW, I can't remember to have shown you a photo of myself. You'd have noticed that my head is actually rather blocky, not anything like pointy at all, if I had. But your pointy head didn't see my cynicism when I talked about the Amazon licensing stuff, nooo. You'd rather ask about the age of the GNUStep project. Don't you know that that is generally considered not very polite, asking about someones age? And besides, it doesn't matter anything, too. The code base is there. You can use it and enhance it at wish. Err... I wasn't stuttering when I said that the first time around, now was I?
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
My initial reading of the license was that it was copyleft. Now, based on what people are saying here, it sounds a lot like the SCSL, which was DOA for obvious reasons.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
By copylefting the back end, they alienated the BSD community. By closing the front end, they alientated the GPL community.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
<pedantry>
If you're using a language with no booleans than you may need to do some of that, but if not please just do
if Infornaut.issarcastic {
...
...
} else {
}
</pedantry>
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
To all folks that want to try: you need a PIIX IDE interface (at least it was true a couplke of month ago, and have not changed).
So, I had no luck booting it with a Gigabyte/Athlon and a K7M/Athlon.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Personally, I like OSes that can do both, and I imagine anybody would.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Actually I do believe the interface is important. It allows the graphical human mind to be able to grasp the relationships between the data a lot quicker, which is what it is all about, anyways. However, programming one is quite easy. If I can write one on a $100 calculator, it can be done on a much fancier computer after I spend as much time learning the language on the computer as I did on my calc.
}
case Infonaut.issarcastic == false {
You're nuts if you don't appreciate the visual interface. Although the command line is fast in issuing commands to your computer, text isn't as efficient for us to comprehend as images. Just because our ideas are almost always expressed through linguistics doesn't mean we have evolved to do it faster than visuals and other non-linguistic means. "Bird chirping" doesn't tell us things that hearing the bird chirp can tell us in the same amount of time. What type of bird is it? Is it friendly? Is it hungry? "Painting of woman" isn't the same as seeing the Mona Lisa.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
I thought it was Newton that had the Apple fall on him.
Just like that wonderful little PDA, I think Darwin is going to go the way of Newton, and Apple will just fall on it, a victim of their own buzz-word surfing.
----
Steve Jobs...than boost the real underdog, the open source effort behind Darwin.
If anyone thinks that Apple's going to do all of Darwin's developing, they either have not been paying attention or are severely deluded. A few notable non-Apple employees have been working on many useful things (/dev/random -- yay!), but the list of Stuff That Needs Doing remains long. Many of these list items aren't anywhere near the top of Apple's list of OS X features -- support for older Power Macs, for example -- so Darwin will have to do without unless an enterprising and energetic outsider steps up.
This whole concept disturbs me. How is it the 'community' should feel bad or somehow 'guilty' that they are not completing the to-do's and building PowerMac support? I recognize their are unique features to Darwin (Mach) but basically it is little more outside of what the BSDs offer already (I am willing to consider that I may be wrong - Darwin _may_ have involved alot of work by Apple & they may have really given the BSDs 'something' - Im not that 'up' on OSX exactly.. but try and understand my point from inital impressions). Why is it the responsibility of the community to build a stable foundation on which OSX can be sold? We must embrace Darwin and make it better?
The way I see it: OSX's most exciting parts are the GUI. Why must the OpenSource movement do the 'support' coding of Darwin while Apple keeps the GUI closed Source? Why would the OpenSource movement enable Apple to sell their Mac OSX when they arent really working in good faith? Apple isnt really interested in enabling extensive porting of OSX - Apple is only going to be selling OSX on Apple boxen and arent interested in OSX running on anything else. Another key ingredient to the 'OpenSource' movement is that we share with developers who work on other than Intel. Like most people here, I would love a new Cube or G4 - but they are too damned expensive (in pure harware spec per $ kind of analysis vs the clones we all build)... What is APPLE offering people? This whole article leaves a bad taste in my mouth - here is Apple (or someone speaking in their interest) saying "Why arent you guys helping us build Darwin?" my reply "Cut the price of your hardware in half (or make it somehow more reasonable) - pay your own developers to port OSX to Intel - and start the OSX League, democratically elect the board, provide some grants/funding"
The OpenSource movement is beginning to look like it may provide a method for proprietary types to subsiize their development costs - without being honest. IBM and RedHat are good examples of companies that I love to support because I think they 'play fair'.
1) The Intel bootloader isn't out yet. Most open source developers use PCs, go figure. You can bend over backwards to run Darwintel but you'll also need an Intel ethernet card. The vast majority of Darwin developers are running OS X.
.tar.gz and often in source only. When the package system is finished at www.openpackages.org Darwin will be a lot easier to deal with.
2) No package system. Darwin doesn't have anything resembling ports or dpkg or whatever. Everything is being distributed in
3) Apple botched the first release. There was nothing to be gained from a Darwin 0.3 release. Also their first ASPL wasn't clear enough. That's fixed now but first impressions are lasting.
---
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
The hell you say. In the lab I work in at my university, there is a G3 and two iMacs, while I have my IBM Thinkpad with linux installed. The G3 is slooow and unstable. It crashes quite often. One of the iMacs has a PARTICULAR stability bug inspite of it having the same software and hardware as the second iMac. Both are prone to lockups (they are updated on MacOS). We have almost a weekly visit from someone on the university IT staff, checking to see if we are having any problems for that week. About 30% of the time, we are but inspite of repeated attempts on their part, the problems remain.
Meanwhile, me on my lowly ThinkPad with linux never crashes. The only problem I have had with it was setting an incorrect hdparm flag, easily corrected, which played hell with booting.
My stepdaughter has an older Mac, a Performa, at home. I have my homebuilt Athlon with linux. She does practically NOTHING with her computer but do wordprocessing now and again, or a little web browsing. You'd think there would NEVER be a problem with that, especially since she just leaves well enough alone. Nope. With her doing NOTHING to dork up that Performa, it occassionally dorks itself up and it is I who must fix it. The only problems I EVER run into with my box are self-inflicted with my constant experimentation and tweaking. When I leave it all alone, problems simply do not exist...ever.
On a certain aspect of your statement I would say you are correct, but then the same holds true on all the homebuilts I have ever had (4). The HARDWARE rarely croaks. The problems are ALWAYS software/OS-related. I would think that OS-X will get beyond typical Apple software/OS problems seeing as how it is built on a rock-solid, ABSOLUTELY trustworthy unix foundation, which means that new Macs with OS-X on them will be as stable as my homebuilts and my laptop...but the hardware, like ALL hardware, will remain a rare source of problem (I have had ONE cdrom croak on me in the history of computers and one 14" monitor from long-ago. ONE cdrom, ONE monitor. Nothing else...although my present old 15" monitor is slowly giving up the ghost, like any monitor will do after a long enough period of time, even an Mac monitor - I've seen that happen twice two in my time with them).
On the whole, I would say you will "get the chicks" on Macs by having to CONSTANTLY fix their stability issues/software issues, and with OS-X, the settings will remain a mystery with the bulk of the great unwashed (male and female alike). So I would say your ability to "get the girls" remains as unchanged on the Mac as it is on the PC-side. There is ALWAYS the need by ignorant users for someone with a computer clue to help them get past their errors or their ignorance or the bad design decisions made by companies like M$ and Apple (with their pre-OS-X/Darwin Crapple MacOS). Fear not for your "love life". People still have problem programming their VCR and you think they will be able to setup networking?
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I say....let's gloat.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
The point the article is making, though, is that the Open Source community, for the most part, isn't really doing that much with Darwin. Yes, OS X may end up sucking as much as (insert your least favorite OS here), but the sad thing here is that the culprit of the bad OS would not be the closed-source, corporate controlled GUI, but rather the Open Source, everybody take a look BSD core. The author of the article spends a good deal of time scratching his head, wondering when the "community" is going to actually start contributing seriously to Darwin.
Now if, as you have speculated, OS X turns out to be a massive failure because Darwin wasn't up to snuff, which camp ends up the worse for the wear: the corporate GUI folks who managed to put together a more-or-less solid user interface; or the Open Source community, that basically ignored an entire operating system for whatever reason? Sure, there's no mandate for anybody to look at the code, much less contribute to it, but rest assured that if Darwin ends up being the downfall of OS X, the Apple spin team will be itching to find somebody to pin it on. Three guesses as to what they might say...
All that said, I'm still itching to see what Apple releases next year. I absolutely loved NeXT, and I'm hoping that OS X takes off like a rocket.
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Well, you are making my point: if something isn't easy enough to try, people won't bother. Linux provided enough functionality and advantages over alternatives for early adopters to get to the point where easy-to-install distributions got created and it became useful to many more people. Darwin seems to still have to cross that threshold.
I am saddened if you can't even install a *nix OS without a wonderful graphical install program.
That would be sad, indeed. Fortunately, I can assure you that that's not a problem: I have manually entered boot loaders in machine code and installed 4.1BSD from tape. But, these days, IMO, a reasonably mature system should come with some kind of installer, just like it comes with a lot of other things that systems didn't use to come with.
1) Darwin is more organized from top to bottom. From drivers to solving the /etc/ chaos
2) Darwin is a macrokernel with less maintenance. No module recompiling.
3) Bundles bundles bundles
4) Potentially faster than FreeBSD
5) Automatic kext loading
6) NetInfo
7) IOKit driver architecture
8) More flexible BSD-like license
9) Corporate support
10) Mach-O binaries. dyld memory use efficiency. FAT binaries
Windows is shit.
Vote for your favorite OSS project:
O <--- Linux
Darwin ---> O
O <--- xBSD
Gnu/HURD ---> O
O <--- XFree86
Apache ---> O
O <--- Perl
BIND ---> O
O <--- Sendmail
Voting ends at 7PM EST and results should be tabulated no later than 7AM the next day.
NOTE: 'Dimpled' chad does NOT count.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What the hell are you talking about? Apple licenced One-Click from Amazon for use in the Apple Store. That's it. If it's a worthless patent (I think it is), then Apple (presumably) paid Amazon for something worthless. It has nothing to do with what you use Darwin for.
So if you want to develop a Free MacOS X, GNUStep is a really good place to start from. I simply hope that by the time MacOS X is released, the headlines will look like "GNUStep: a better MacOS X than MacOS X" :-)
And it's been what, 5-10 years, that work on GNUStep has been going on? How far along is it? Can it do any of the things which separate Mac OS X from NextStep? Will it ever?
I'm not sure how to get this through your pointy little head, but I'll try: Darwin isn't intended as a Linux/[Free|Open|Net]BSD replacement. It's simply the ultimate documentation for the low levels of Mac OS X. If it helps people write better device drivers for Mac OS X, it's a huge win for Apple. If someone can catch a bug in the OS, it's a great thing for everyone. If it lets people run Mac OS X on older hardware, it's a win for customers who don't want to buy new Macs. Intel support might serve as Apple's escape hatch from Motorola's incompetence, but that's still up in the air.
The political rationalle behind "free" software doesn't really enter into Apple's reasons for releasing Darwin, so don't look for one, or even complain about Darwin not being free enough to satisfy you.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
This brings to question - MAC OS/X is aimed at the server market
Really? Who said that? It's certainly wasn't Apple. Oh, wait maybe you mean Mac OS X Server, which is currently an entirely different product. And furthermore, Mac OS X Server is aimed at the Mac server admin. It's not going up against Solaris.
This also rises another question - whats with this "Lets make unix idiot proof so all the stupid people can use it."
What do you mean "what's with" it? It's a good idea. And just because you don't know about ifconfig doesn't mean you're stoopid. Why should people be forced to deal with that stuff if they don't want to?
KDE anyone?
If you honestly think KDE and Mac OS X are equivalent in terms of concept and technology, you need to do more research.
Sorry to bust all the redhat users' bubbles but unix will NEVER be suitable for the desktop.
You'd better actually try Mac OS X before you say that again.
Microsoft and its programmers own the desktop till the end of time.
First, this is a silly statemnt, but secondly, this has nothing to do with Unix being suitable for the desktop. I think you're mixing up cause and effect.
Why, oh why, do I insist on responding to AC flamebait?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Keep in mind, people: Apple is not trying to make Darwin yet another Linux/BSD/Whatever competitor. Apple open-sourced the lower layers of the OS, to make life easier for Macintosh developers.
Before this, back in the NeXT days, getting kernal source was like pulling teeth, and a lot of us needed it. Now, we can read it anytime, modify it if it's broken, and get our mods into the main development tree.
Darwin is a Mac thing. It's not a Free Software Community thing, and it's not supposed to be.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't suppose that Apple needs to give away the source to OS X to
get the support of the open source community: instead providing
support and commitment for the equivalent of WINE for OS X on a free
software platform (Linux and/or BSD) would be enough. This would do a
lot to get support for the platform from the OS cumminty. Check out
this article by Jordan Hubbard on why Apple might want to do this
(though Jordan advocates Apple actually opening up the source).
And, let's figure, who doesn't?
Wasn't apple that company that bought rights to the one-click shopping "patent" from Amazon.com, and showed they were even proud of that? (Actually this is a rhetorical question, never bother replying "yes, they were".) So if you own anything of a Website with a shopping interface which is just a little bit too easy, you can't use Darwin. Sucks, right?
So I don't give for MacOS X, and I think that anyone who codes for MacOS X in his spare time isn't helping out anybody but Apple. Apple owns this code. No-one (and then again, everyone) owns Free Software.
If you think that the MacOS concepts are cool, you'd be glad to hear that they are modeled after the open OpenStep standard. And if you want to work on a Free OpenStep implementation, go work on GNUStep.
Yes, there are differences with MacOS X (and NextStep):
- Binary incompatibility (due to compiler issues and to undocumented resource file formats in the OpenStep specification)
- Works on top of the X Window System instead of its own graphics thingies
- Follows the NextStep look & feel
- Not Out Of Beta Yet (doh, the only NS implementation that
;-)
However, this particular implementation is Free so you can modify it any way you want, keep your modifications private when you only use it yourself, and there is no single instance that can demand strange things for you. Making GNUStep appear like MacOS X might even be considered a doable task (though I don't intend to say it's simple), though walking away from X must be much harder. And anyone can help getting this stuff Out Of Beta.- is
Out Of Beta is Out Of Print as wellSo if you want to develop a Free MacOS X, GNUStep is a really good place to start from. I simply hope that by the time MacOS X is released, the headlines will look like "GNUStep: a better MacOS X than MacOS X" :-)
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
If I offended you with that Windows ME reference, leave this site immediately.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
What made me pick up Linux in 1994 was the fact that it came as a complete distribution, pretty much ready to install and run. Those distributions had a number of limitations when it came to drivers and tools, but they were usable and could be used to solve specific problems.
I haven't been able to find a complete distribution for the PC based on the Darwin kernel. Such a distribution would require the kernel, the command line utilities, development tools, X11, and at least one desktop (Gnome, KDE, GNUStep, ...). Such a distribution would be useful even if the set of available drivers is pretty limited (IDE, maybe a SCSI card, a couple of common Ethernet cards).
This article, Open-sourcing the Apple, has a different point of view on the subject.
If you travel in geek circles, by now you have no doubt heard about Apple's beta release of OS X, a wholly new operating system for the Macintosh. That's especially true if you are a member of that subset of geeks who closely follow open-source software issues.
OS X is a much anticipated amalgam of the Mach 3.0 microkernel from Carnegie-Mellon University, and FreeBSD 3.2, a more traditional open-source Unix-compatible operating system from the FreeBSD Project. But knowing that OS X is a microkernel wrapped up in a Unix OS, which is in turn wrapped up in a whole new layer of graphical user interface (GUI) technology, doesn't tell the whole story. Is OS X just another fancy GUI-based operating desktop system like Windows or is it a more industrially useful server-centric operating system like FreeBSD or Linux-based OS's? Crafting user interfaces is Apple's widely acknowledged forte; FreeBSD technology is known to power major Internet sites like Yahoo and Sony Japan. So which is it?
Or is it both? It is possible for one operating system to satisfy both the needs of someone like myself, a FreeBSD developer who expects a lot of power and flexibility from an operating system, and the average user who just wants to point and click?
( read more)
I would guess that a lot of the reason the OSS community isn't putting a lot of effort is the "schism" between OSX beta and Darwin mentioned by Somogyi. If there's a two month delay between releasing OSX beta and the equivalent Darwin, then there's two months of work that's happened at Apple that isn't in the current Darwin.
How much effort would you put into fixing two-month-old code that you knew a large group of people were modifying daily?
...but not many people use the whole thing. Darwin Streaming Server is a top notch streaming media element, and is out for FreeBSD, Red Hat, Solaris, and Win NT/2k, as well as the source code. It also includes a proxy, so that you can configure your server as desired. It's equivalent to the QuickTime streaming server for OS X. As it becomes used, there will probably be patchs for each operating system, and it's development will parallel the QuickTime development for OS X.
e aming/
w in/
. html
http://www.publicsource.apple.com//projects/str
Darwin 2.1 is the core of OS X, and it's been released in segments, so developers can concentrate on the aspect of darwin they want to tweak, and maintain compatability with the main release.
http://www.publicsource.apple.com//projects/dar
All in all, there are many possibilites, but for the average hacker, the resources to get a G3 or a G4 to test the software out are probably lacking. As for the intel release, it's being worked on. The current version of Darwin can be tweaked to run on an intel, and there are details here:
http://www.publicsource.apple.com/projects/mail
this is also addressed in the FAQ.
Let's see. Darwin lacks all Quartz, Aqua, the OO API, and all of the nifty features in OSX, and in return, it uses an antiquated microkernel (mach) and runs FreeBSD in user space.
A) It's an ugly hack.
B) Its slower than straight FreeBSD.
C) It offer absolutely no advantage over FreeBSD in terms of anything. Not even stability, since BSD runs in kernel space anyway.
Why SHOULD anyone pay attention to Darwin, given its total lack of salient features?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've heard that Darwin boots on Intel, and I'd love to check it out for myself, but I haven't been able to actually find any way of doing it. Anybody here been able to get it working? If so, how?
If you're interested in seeing Apple pursue this further, make sure to check out the OSX on Intel petition. Also, read the Register article about rumors that Apple is actually porting OSX to Intel, and their article about Apple's recent Darwin update.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
First on the list, I suspect, would be...
'When is Quicktime player components going to be open sourced?'
I don't think that's going to happen, any time soon. For those people who want it as a matter of convenience (do everything in Linux!), that's all it is, a convenience.
For those who would need the Quicktime functionality... I guess it's too bad. For each OS their respective strengths, and movie/audio/media happens to be an Apple thing.
For those who would want that codecs for tinkering/development purposes... isn't that what Vorbis is all about?
'When are you going to port Aqua to the Intel world?'
We have, but since we don't make Intel/AMD branded hardware, we won't be selling the software. We would get millions in sales, as a secure, stable, BSD based Intel-platform OS, without any sales of hardware(currently), which means the only revenue model we could pursue would be updates and upgrades to the OS... Therefore shortchanging the R&D and development innovations of a floppy-less iMac, the FireWire enabled devices, the Airport capable systems, the long-battery life portables, the fanless designs, etc.
'How about your PDA plans?'
We are currently researching and developing a PDA strategy.
Now that those questions are out of the way... Hopefully more interesting philosophical/technical/social questions can be asked.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I feel that one of the strongest points of Darwin that everyone is really overlooking is the Bundle system, a directory that groups together all the associated files of an application (and which abstracts out this directory *as* the application). This is a system far superior to the way that windows or any linux/RPM deals with the question of "what constitutes a packaged application?". If you have a centralized database such into which app information is installed (such as the RPM database or windows registry) and there is no metadata or anything else from which a new database can be rebuilt, you end up with a techsupport nightmare. The centralized database could (and usually does) get hosed and (re)(de)installing an application is difficult if not impossible. The bundle system presents a far more robust solution, since all files associated with an app are kept together in a directory and not just in a single, fragile, non-rebuildable database. The bundle system could dramatically reduce the TCO that windows incurs through the registry (probably at the cost I/O efficiency), something the corporate world would find attractive (if the dumb bastards actually looked at TCO when making purchasing decisions). Linux should scrap RPM/Deb altogether and simply go with Bundles.
Right here.
;)
That should get you started.