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Darwin Team Answers & Develop on Darwin
Lagos writes "In July Darwin developers at Apple had a call for questions. Their answers were posted on Monday and may be found here. There is some discussion of Apple's place within the Open Source community, though most of the questions answered are more technical." Along the same Darwinian lines, this submission came in: Maktoo writes "Maccentral is reporting that SourceForge.net has added PowerMac G4 Servers running MacOS X 10.1 into their Compile Farm. Now any apps you have going on SourceForge, you can test to see if it'll run on OS X! Gotta love that BSD heritage... OS X is already going to benefit greatly from all the apps it can use in the UNIX/Linux space. This just makes life easier for developers to bring even more."
If you're interested in Darwin, and you live in the S.F bay area, come to the BANG meeting tonight at Apple Town Hall auditorium. The subject is Mac OS X 10.1, and Fred Sanchez will be there.
See http://www.bang.org/ for the details.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The short answer is yes. Mac OS X is a full-blown 4.4 BSD lite OS.
It doesn't come with the X window system, but there are several commercial and free ports of X available.
The place to find information on apps for Mac OS X is stepwise.com. Click on the link that says "softrak".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
OS X is mostly like any other UNIX. As long as you have the source code and can recompile it it should work under OS X in most cases.
the simple answer: Sort of.
the real answer: it all depends...
the explanation: if you can compile it, you can run it. if its a command line program, you're porting compile is considerably easier. if its Graphical, you've got a bit harder approach since OSX uses Aqua - a graphical display system which has bases in display PDF (some *nixes GUI systems used to be based on Display Postscript - see Solaris' OpenWindows v1.x)
however, since i've yet to see a linux/bsd / solaris / aix application that uses aqua, if its a gui program its probably doing Xwindows. to run X on X, you gotta do some tricks, theres a few methods, but Darwin has ported XFree86 to X. it runs pretty well too.
what i've found is that the quickest way to get an aqua app running is to find a java version of the application if possible since the awt/swing -> aqua stuff is abstracted by the osx implementation of java. but this doesnt solve all your woes.
Kind of. Darwin is actually the core of the new Mac OS, including a kernel based on Mach and BSD4.4 compatible Unix layer. Darwin has been released as open source software. It was built to run on PowerPc systems, all the way up the G4. However, the Darwing team has ported it to the x86. If you have a system that meets their guidelines, you can actually run Darwin on an x86, though I'm not real sure why you'd want to. Some have speculated that with a simple recompile and rewrite of some drivers, Apple could port OS X to the x86. Hope this helps.
Get more info here:
http://www.apple.com/darwin/
My other computer is your Windows box
Aqua is not simply a window manager and widget set you can install on top of a X11 server. It relies on a different drawing sub-system
A simple port would imply rewriting the low-level IOKit functions for BSD/Linux and then recompile the foundations classes, and the Quartz rendering engine and then finally the Aqua layer. While it would not be very difficult, most of the code as been ported to many architectures. I suspect that a lot of work went into optimising Aqua for the PPC processor and the Atlivec unit. Aqua implies a lot of processing, and I would think that a straigtforward port would be very slow.
Then again if Apple did this, they would roughtly have changed kernels, using the Linux/BSD kernel instead of Mach - what would be the point?
Darwin is just the name of the core OS consisting of a Apple developed variant of FreeBSD 3.2 with a modified Mach kernel. Apple maintains PPC trees and x86 trees, which are both open source. The GNU/Darwin project is a non-Apple (mostly) effort to develop the x86 version, while Apple primarily develops the PPC version. I assume they share their contributions somehow with a common code base.
The higher level stuff in Mac OS X: graphics/drawing libs, application frameworks, and applications are all closed source and PPC only.
Check out the Fink project. It's a distribution full of Darwin ports of all the usual Linux/UNIX software with Debian-style package tools.
Right now, I use a whole bunch of Linux/UNIX software on OS X, primarily Enlightenment, GIMP, XEmacs, XFig, Dia, TeTeX, Ghostscript, and a bunch of little GNOME utils. You can set up X to run side-by-side with Aqua in it's own desktop, or you can have your X apps share the screen with Aqua in "rootless" mode (although that has some quirks).
I was dual booting with YDL 2.0 for a while, but I don't bother anymore since I've got everything I want installed on OS X. There's even a full GNOME port available. I don't know about KDE though.
But what it comes down to is getting work done. Having OSX has not lessened my Linux time. I am doing some graphics on My OSX machine, and surfing in YellowDog Linux on my G3.
Yeah, and I am using GIMP and Photoshop today, that is Classic(OS9.2.1) OSX, and XDarwin. Let's see ya do that on your GateWay. OSX is about flexibility. Jobs knew that butting heads with Gates is a losing strategy, OSX is an end run. He is uniting the NIX world.
Insisting on Purity will only slow our movement. It was good to get a solid base, but now it is time to be inclusive.
Get yourself an iBook and see what OSX is all about.
photosMy Photostream
A lot of people are saying "it depends," but I'm not really sure why. Just about any UNIX app that will compile on *BSD (graphical or not) can run on OS X. Get XonX and you can run a rootless XFree86 port right next to the Aqua windows. Where does "it depends" even enter this? OS X is as much a UNIX as FreeBSD and Linux are, period.
:).
The funny thing I've found however, is that after going to great lengths to install beta versions of XDarwin and hacking libraries to get them to compile (this was 6 months ago, all of this is much easier now), I found myself wondering what exactly to do with it. I put a lot of importance on running my old Linux apps, but when it came down to it there was nothing I needed to run under X! I used the Gimp for a bit, but then picked up a copy of Photoshop instead; Mozilla runs better under Aqua than X-Windows; Fire is a great ICQ client and I really like Apple's Mail.app for email; Microsoft Office for the Mac is hands down better than any UNIX clone (or even Office for Windows). The new Office for X looks phenomenal! Everybody using OS X should download the Word for X trial version and try it for themselves. StarOffice and the like don't even come close to this newest version of Word for the Mac. Amazing.
Sometimes I use the xterms in XDarwin just for old times sake, and it's nice to remotely connect to my linux box though the X Server, but what really struck me is how much better apps are in OS X than they are in Linux. Sure a lot of these apps aren't free, but I was never using them because they were free: I was using them because they got the job done well. Now I'm using no X-Windows apps, a handful of OS 9 apps, but the vast majority of the apps I use are OS X native. It's official, I'm a Mac convert
- j
Platform independence is a GOOD thing!
The software that runs under Linux is already available on plenty of other platforms. In fact, a lot of it was developed on other platforms, including the various BSD flavors, Solaris, IRIX, UNIXware, etc. Most of the command line stuff even runs on Windows NT & 2000 with Cygwin. And numerous ports are available for BeOS, Atheos, QNX, etc.
There's nothing wrong with the software being ported to commercial platforms. All that means is that there may be more people using and contributing to the software. And remember that the majority of the UNIX world is still commercial. Linux is still a niche player.
Linux is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is an OS were talking about here, not a religion. World domination is a joke, remember? Seriously, Linux will have to compete based on the merits of the platform, and the less we tie software to a particular platform, the better.
Most BSD programs seem to compile OK, the biggest problem I've had is compiling anything that needs access to device drivers, in which case you need to rewrite the code for the IOKit. What I would do for a DEC network driver right now (tulip in Linux)...
Actually there is a freeware/shareware program called Graphic Converter that does the job for a reasonable price.
As for TeX, I also use it, but I use a nice tool called TexShop that is really nice, free and open source. It uses pdttex to compile and renders the file directly in pdf, so you get all the nice features of Quartz, like anti-aliasing.
Hello... VHS vs Beta (tried, but true example of marketing versus quality).
Actually, as usual, the conventional wisdom is wrong in their explanation. Beta was actually well ahead in unit sales until the rise of pr0n on VHS. No, really.
See, to RECORD a Beta tape, you needed a Sony-licensed machine; very expensive. On the other hand, anybody could make a (comparatively) cheap VHS camera. And the numbers tell the story; when Beta and VHS had about the same number of titles available, Beta led in sales. About seven months after the first VHS cameras hit US shelves, VHS had six times as many titles available, of which not quite half were cheap pr0n flicks. And, needless to say, VHS piracy was rampant, while Beta piracy was next to nonexistent.
Sales of the two respective systems, which until then had moved along similar trendlines, promptly diverged radically.
Lesson to be learned from this: Technology adoption is driven by piracy and pr0n. As if looking at any contemporary P2P network hadn't made that clear to you already...
From the FAQ:
/dev/random, a system-level entropy provider. Adding a decent /dev/random would be a Good Thing.
/dev/random is not in the latest Darwin binary release, it is now in the kernel sources available in the Darwin CVS repository. It took us a bit of time to release it because we wanted to be sure of its quality. Check it out and enjoy!
/dev/random now, and I can chuck away the entropy daemon I've been using?
Q: Porting Unix software to Mac OS X, one thing that is often sorely missed (especially in cryptographic tools) is
A: Although
So does this mean that OS 10.1 has a
Anyone (early 10.1 users) know the answer?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Layers are there, with all the layer blending options from PS6, the text support is the same as PS6 (for better or worse...), and it comes with a large variety of filters.
The show-stopper for me was the absence of guides. I often need to take Photoshop files made by other folks and "cut them up" into various components for use in HTML pages and/or Flash components. Without guides, that's a major PITA.
The common idea is that PSElements must be useful for the web, because it lacks things that are critical for print work - CMYK support among others. But, it also lacks features that many web pros consider critical. I'm not certain who, really, would find it useful.
I just want to contradict the perception here that BSD sprung entirely from the 'great swordsmiths' of Open Source programmers.
BSD UNIX was a US government funded project intended to advance the state-of-the-art for the computer industry as a whole. The entire intent was to allow commercial companies to 'steal' the code to improve interoperability -- in fact iconic BSD developers like Bill Joy got very rich doing just that. BSD code is used in virtually every OS -- it's a significant chunk of every commercial Unix, probably a bunch in GNU, and there's small bits in Windows, as has been repeatedly discussed.
Not to take away anything from the people who deUNIXifed BSD and have been doing a excellent job maintaining it ever since. Just that Apple won't be the first nor the last to use BSD code in their OS. Compared to every other commercial user of BSD code, they've been saints.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I use a DP G4 at work ($4000.00).. but at home I've been happy with my 400mhz G3 iMac for about 2 years now ($1100.00). It runs OS X like a champ. If you want to play games though, better stick to your x86 machines...
I haven't actually used Photoshop Elements, but my understanding is that it doesn't support layers, has weak support for text, and comes with a pretty limited set of filters.
:)
Wrong to all of the above. Everything you mentioned is there, and it includes all of the basic Photoshop filters, completely un-crippled, which is more than enough for 99% of users. Many of the features are presented in a much more intuitive way for beginners, though just about every function you'd find in the GIMP is there.
I'm not going to spend a dime on anything that isn't Carbon or Cocoa.
That's understandable; I'll give you this one
GIMP provides everything I need, and I've been using it for ~2 years so I'm used to the interface. Why change?
Well sure, use what you're most familiar with, but the conversation started with a reference to Mac users switching over to the GIMP. If you're familiar with the GIMP, that's fine, but you would be doing a great disservice to a beginner if you told them to use the GIMP over Photoshop Elements.
- j
So any app that's written to Qt (and there's a lot of them out there for Linux) should require just a recompile and work perfectly fine under Quartz/Aqua.
The top-of-the-line stock desktop machine doesn't even cost $4000:
$3,499.00
Dual 800MHz PowerPC G4
256K L2 & 2MB L3 per processor
256MB SDRAM memory
80GB Ultra ATA drive
SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX w/TwinView
Gigabit Ethernet
56K internal modem
But this is some pretty serious hardware. The TwinView thing is a video card with two ports on it. The SuperDrive is a DVD/DVD-R/CD-RW drive.
iMacs start at $999. Towers start at $1699. Apple averages ~30% gross margins because it has a software, hardware and a platform to develop and maintain. Much of the software is outright free, and all Mac users also get free email and 20MB web space/nework storage -- all without ads.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas