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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."
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.
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?
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
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...