GNU-Darwin Goes Beta

proclus writes "OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command. As Root: "curl http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/one_stop | csh"." This assummes you have curl or wget or something. From there you can install gnome, abiword, gimp or whatever. Looks pretty smooth (although I'm kinda confused how you get back to OSX.1 from there ;)

Comments

What's so special about this distribution?

[Jeremy Erwin]

I use fink myself. It's sort of a clone of apt-get for OSX. I have octave, gimp, latex, and a host of other applications on my machine. What's the advantage of this "distribution"?

Re:gnome over x?

[alfredo]

It gives expanded resources. You can run it rootless so XWindows apps run alongside Aqua apps.

Steve Jobs knew this would happen. Kind of like Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come."

Here is one screenshotWindowmaker and other goodies

this one is nice too. a lot going on

Um, disturbing

[skullY]

Is anyone else highly disturbed by this? Have you read through that csh script? And why csh, there's no black magic there, and at least my copy of osx came with /bin/sh.

From the script:

essential_binaries:
curl -o wget http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/packages/wget
chmod 755 wget
cp wget /usr/bin
rehash

Erm, so 10.1 comes with curl, which besides providing a library for use in your own programs, also seems to be more unix-like and full featured than wget, with the exception of recursively getting an entire directory tree, which 95% of the time I use wget I'm not doing anyway. This script also doesn't seem to use wget for anything but fetching single files. (Was s/wget/curl -O/ too hard?)

cd /usr/bin
mv tar ~
wget http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/packages/tar
chmod 755 /usr/bin/tar
wget http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/packages/killall
chmod 755 /usr/bin/killall

Oh boy, here come the first of the unwelcome "improvements." Apple thoughtfull provided not only the bsd tar program, but a binary called "gnutar" as well that seems to support all the options of GNU tar on my linux machines (With the one exception of bzip2 compatability, but that's easily fixed by piping bzip2 output to tar.) And KILLALL, don't forget about one of the single most dangerous commands to get into the habit of using, next to rm -rf. God forbid they have to cat pid files or even use awk to figure out a process id in a one time use shell script. It might make the script ugly.

*sigh*

I really do appreciate the work GNU-Darwin is doing, they're filling the few gaps on my osx machine. I just wish they didn't go the extra mile to make my system GNUified. It's not becoming of a nice BSD install.

x86 Darwin

[Hostile17]

Does anyone know if any active development is taking place for the x86 port of Darwin ? I have downloaded it and had look, but it supports very little hardware and if I build a system just for it, I might as well get an iMac and use it in its native platform.