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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."
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
Mod point free since 2001
i thought darwin was the version that would run on the x86 and wasn't being offically supported but done as an opensource project?
I'm ignorant, I admit, but I'd love to know one thing about Mac OS X:
If running OS X, can you use linux/unix software?
~ now you know
Many people complain about Linux not being user-friendly enough in the GUI. Whether that is true or not is irrevelant to my question. Near everyone can agree that Apple has the best GUI. We're talking about how easy it is to port *BSD/Linux apps to OS X ... how easy do you think it would be for Apple to port Aqua to *BSD/Linux?
-As beautiful as KDE is, I would drop it in a heartbeat for Aqua.
Nosce te Ipsum
I'm sorry if this is seen as flamebait, but isn't anyone else concerned that potentially all apps that run under Linux would migrate their way to another (commercial) OS with marketing power, and a desire to influence it? Couldn't this be a real threat to Linux? What if everything that ran under Linux suddenly started working under Windows? Wouldn't that reduce the marketability of Linux? If I were a corporation considering switching to a different environment, all be it a more stable one, when I only have people on staff who know the current environment, might I not be inclined to stay with the current environment given that the tools from the new one were available within the current one? Immediate costs would be reduced as there's less of a rollout, even if licensing in the long run is more expensive.
I think it's a great testament to Open Source that Apple chose to heavily base their OS on it; Apple decision makers aren't idiots, they know a good thing when they see it. But in the end, it takes a piece of the market owned wholly by *nices and allows a commercial entity to have a share of it.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
They should give Darwin Awards to the most hard-working of them.
Does Darwin have a kernel panic if you try to boot with a mouse that has more than one button?
I'll assume that you're not a troll, since I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt.
No. I use a MSFT Intellimouse with X, and it works just fine. The scroll wheel even works in some apps; the right mouse button is recognized for the limited contextual menus that X has.
--
$tar -xvf
Touche! However, "and the less we tie software to a particular platform, the better," so what advantage is there to Linux over other OS's if everything that Linux does can be done by them as well, in a completely identical manner? It's a moral dilemma for me, with out other OS's providing their features to Linux, and Linux providing all their features to other OS's, Linux itself holds no individual advantage.
Of course, I'm getting bogged down in thinking of Linux as a distribution, not a kernel. Linux is a kernel; it's a core OS. The software that was developed FOR Linux, while significantly adding to its marketability, does not COMPRISE Linux. That might be considered a weakness of relying entirely on the Open Source movement (which I wholeheartedly believe in), in that any advantage that you hold, your competitors can very easily absorb... embrace and extend... frightening.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
This is really more of a rant than flame bait, but I'm going to throw this in here just to see who bytes.
Speaking as a Mac user who uses Linux at my job, why should I bother with OS X? IMHO Linux is much more flexible and seems to me to have more of a future in business than Apple or OS X ever will. I was very exited when Apple bought NeXT, but after waiting 5 years, OS X 1.0 just left me cold. Why should I spend time learning about OS X when I could be honing my Linux skills?
Where would we be if Wheel had hid her round rock in a cave instead of showing everyone how it rolls?
If I was a foreman at a construction company, I wouldn't force the bricklayers to use hammers just because the carpenters are really productive with them. A computer is a tool. Use whichever one is right for the job.
Alot of my job revolves around web development. For me, OS X is perfect because I have Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and vi all on the same machine. I tried to use Linux, but alot of my time was spent dual-booting.
You probably do other things, so another machine might be better suited for what you do. Whatever. Better or worse is all relative to what you want to accomplish.
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. --
Although I've been able to compile lots of UNIX apps to OSX like ircII, lynx, MySQL, Xfree86, etc.. I wasn't able to get GtkRadiant compiled for X.. anyone got this working? If so, it would be the first set of quality Quake3 map/skin editing tools accessible to Mac users (finally) ... however I couldn't get past "make"-ing setupdb..
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
I'm afraid that I don't see your point. Apple is now just another commercial unix vendor, much like Sun or IBM. The only difference is that they're targeting the desktop market instead of servers. How does this threaten the open source community, or specifically, BSD?
Are BSD coders going to drop everything and start hacking on Darwin? Not likely. Darwin is pretty nifty, but projects like OpenBSD have different goals. People might lose interest in Linux PPC, but that will only happen if Apple puts out a superior (and free) product.
Besides which, Apple's been a pretty good neighbor. They've given a lot back to FreeBSD and GCC, and that says a lot. The traditional way of squashing a technology is "embrace and extend", but that requires your extensions to be closed-source. Darwin is totally open, and the contributions to GCC and FreeBSD are anything but closed.
Your rant seems more born from fear than reason. Why are you scared of OS X? It's a full-featured unix that my mom can use. Why is that threatening?
This
Well said, valid point, this deserves mod up!
I didn't intend to imply that Apple will necessarily backstab the BSD developers, let alone plan to for the future. As I said in another post on this thread, BSD is clearly adding a lot to OS-X, and they would be foolish to intentionally squash it. Looks like I might have unintentionally forged a mini holy war here. My original intent was to basically say "Watch out for embrace and extend"
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
It seems like every other Apple article posted to Slashdot draws comments from people who want Apple to give away their crown jewels, and have some kind of wacky idea as to why that would be a good idea for Apple.
Open source is really cool and all that jazz, but there are times when a company's best interests are served by keeping some code proprietary. You don't see Veritas giving away their volume manager, and you won't any time soon, either. Same deal with Apple.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
> [W]hat advantage is there to Linux over
> other OS's if everything that Linux does can
> be done by them as well, in a completely
> identical manner?
Now you're getting it! Open source is the graveyard of revenue-producing intellectual property -- when an idea is sufficiently well-understood and unencumbered by patents, it is implemented in open-source and thus commoditized.
Apple understands that unix's base functionality is no longer a source of proprietary advantage. That's why they weren't afraid to open their kernel and BSD userland source. But their graphics and user interface software contain real innovation and valuable proprietary ideas.
Open source software can provide considerable value to the world by providing a baseline. Part of the idea of BSD-licensed software is that no new implementation has any excuse for being worse than the BSD-licensed implementation, because they can use the BSD-licensed implementation with basically no strings attached.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
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...
Why should I spend a couple of thousand dollars (at least) for the hardware and software to run OSX just to see if I like it better than the OS I use now (Linux) which works perfectly fine for me?
Why don't you switch to BeOS? It's probably better than both Linux and OSX. Go ahead, do it and see if it's better.
With MacOSX, you get unix with a mac interface. With all the other unix desktop environments, you get unix with a windows interface. While much talk is made in the linux community about "yes, we've got skins for apple this and mac that" the widget layouts, keyboard shortcuts, and other thingies about GNOME/KDE are all Windows carbon copies. If you don't like anything that resembles a windows interface, linux may not be right for you. On the other hand, there's nothing preventing you from going into the GNOME/KDE sources and "deredmonifying" stuff.
I had a wee look around the darwin site, and in particular their bug tracking area. I must say it's pretty feeble -- immediately the thought sprung to mind that they should be using bugzilla. Anyone know whey they appear to be growing their own rather than using an already extremely capable system like bugzilla?
The advantage of Linux is not the apps, it's the OS itself. Windows is unstable, expensive, buggy, and insecure compared to Linux. Anyone using Linux has chosen it for specific reasons that do not apply the Microsoft operating systems.
The real threat is the other direction. If Windows apps ran on other platforms wouldn't that reduce the marketability of Windows?
Another great resource for X11 support (and debian install apps) is
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
The problem, to most open source advocates, is not that your new applications aren't (beer) free - we all like to see developers well compensated for their efforts - but rather that they aren't (speech) free. You will never see the source code, and the community will never have the benefit of the work of those developers... at some point in the not-so-distant future, you will no longer even be able to "purchase" any license for that software you're using; you'll have to lease it instead. Both Microsoft and Adobe have expressed interest in this new-and-improved revenue model - which they will undoubtedly market (consumer inconvenience aside) as merely their best response to "software piracy".
Of course you are (speech) free to use the software that you prefer. But I hope you consider the political benefits of (speech) free software to be a point in its favor - above and beyond any price differential.
-Renard
To be honest with you it might not be such a bad thing. There are people who *have* to use M$ apps (such as PAs, HR, parents etc), and so will never be swayed by stuff like Star Office, K-Office, AbiWord, Gimp etc.
Anyways, the point is that traditionally they would have to buy both the OS *and* the app. But if they could get away with just paying for the app, then I think that Linux/*nix will suddenly be an attractive option to many folk. Lets face it M$ make really good office software.
Least not the corporates which is somewhere M$ completely dominates. Linux/*nix needs a killer app or at least something that will draw normal users to it. The techies are already sold but we need that something else to bring people in....
As the desktop environments evolve (new KDE is swweeet), and programs such as Mozilla are becoming more professional in their operation and presentation, it wont be too long hopefully before there will be shift.
Besides it would be sweet to see people migrating off Windows and onto something else but by M$ own hand no?
Po
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 $1699. Apple averages ~30% gross margins because it has a software, hardware and a platform to develop and maintain. Much of the software is outright free, and all Mac users also get free email and 20MB web space/nework storage -- all without ads.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
:)
I hear ya man.
I never get tired of the look on peoples faces when I suggest something else apart from M$.
And I dont know if those people ever get use to my face when they tell me they dont like what I offered cause it doesnt *look* familiar.......
Regards,
Po