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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 interested in getting more OS X information in general, the Collge Park chapter of ACM is having a speaker from Apple today to talk about it. Its from 5-6, in the Classrom Building (yes, that actually is the name of one of our buildings), room 0111
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The short answer is yes: OS X is a Unix variant - so you only need to recompile the software. In fact many tools of OS X are typical Unix programs, apache, perl, gcc, tcsh, etc...
The long answer is, it depends. While OS X is clearly Unix, there are some issues:
- OS X is from the BDS Unix familly, so linux programs might need some tweaking.
- OS X is structured differently from other Unixes, standart paths are different and configuration files are very different.
- Most Unix system use the X11 standart for GUI. OS X does not use X11 but instead a protocol based on display PDF. While it is possible to install an X11 server (for instance Xfree), this is not the default installation.
Still many Unix programs have been ported to OS X in the rather short timeframe of it's existence(~six months).