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Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard
We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.
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I've been a Linux user for seven or eight years now, and I had never even considered picking up a Macintosh until the release of OS X. OS X 10.1 sold me -- it's an absolutely fantastic piece of software.
.. everything you need to be productive.)
There's a complete BSD environment going on underneath everything in OS X (you can pull up a terminal and poke around) with all the benefits that that brings -- ease of development with GNU tools, fantastic memory management, rock solid stability, multi-user ability, and a horde of other features that Microsoft can only dream of. However, you'd never know this using the OS casually, because on top of everything is a beautiful, seamless GUI that holds everything together and hides the implementation details. The OS X window manager is gorgeous, and fully functional (much more oriented towards multiple applications than OS 9 and earlier ever were,) complete with everything that you could expect, along with a lot of eye candy.
Overall, I'm immensely impressed with OS X. All the features of a standard UNIX, with the added bonus of a fantastic GUI, and good application support (Photoshop, Office, IE,
Check it out if you get the chance.
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I've been a linux user for almost 6 years, and generally laughed at Macs (the whole one-button thing, etc.)
I wanted to find a nice laptop that would run linux, and even had a dell for a few days. Then, a friend of mine introduced me to Macs, and, in particular, the Tibook. You can see it yourself - overall, its probably the single best piece of hardware engineering imaginable.
And OS X really is awesome. I'm not into having the point-and-click interface myself, and love the console. But OS X really is nice to use. Its networking support is amazing, and works right out of the box. Support for sleep is great too.
Right now, from what I can see, the biggest problem with OS X is the lack of a decent DivX player. (4.11 tends to desync in about a second). Otherwise, it's awesome. And, if you really can't let go of blackbox or whatever (like me), there's the XDarwin project that lets you run X on top of OS X. So far, I've only tested the default twm, which runs fine. But using the apple developer tools you can compile any window that's been ported (I believe at least gnome and afterstep have been), and run it there.
Certain products are still not quite ready for OS X, but the situation is improving rapidly. I have to disagree with one of the posts below - its not about being "productive"; one could easily do that in Linux. (I refused to run IE, and will
NOT be getting Office). But it is a sincerely nice operating system to use, and the hardware is definitely going to be a computer legend.
Regards,
trurl
No, NO, NO! Trademarks are lost if they aren't defended, not copyright. Is this really such a difficult distinction for Slashdot readers to make?
This is a great start, and I hope that it is very sucessful and prompts other commercial companies too start to champion open source. Value added solutions can be viable business models.
While I am glad to see open-source get accepted in the marketplace, I fear that open-source projects could very quickly become nothing more than cheap publicity stunts for companies. Our burgeoning corporate republic depends on keeping the sheeple quietly content, and by pacifying the vocal Open-Source Community with a few open-source project could very quickly become just another political manoeuvre, no more meaningful than kissing babies or making token efforts to be "environmentally friendly". This is what Apple's open-source efforts smell like to me, and I personally would rather see companies be more open altogether rather than just throw out some code and say "look, we're open source!"
I would advise that you simply have to try it to
find out.
I found using MacOSX to be somewhat like using
BSDi and Mac OS Ten Server. I am primarily a
Linux user and I find the BSD toolsets to be just
different enough with new, missing, different
command switches that it slows me down. I end up
downloading and installing the GNU tools. I also
dislike the excessive use of capital letters in
the naming of its directories. I end up
symlinking them to lowercase names. They do
leave the standard unix directories pretty much
intact. The desktop was pretty stunning and could
do interesting effects, but I have to delve into
the command line quite a bit. It just was not
compelling enough to switch. It is hard to teach
an old dog a new trick.
Apple also has the following opensource projects:
Quicktime Streaming Server
Openplay and Net Sprocket
Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA)
HeaderDoc
Documentation
Also Apple has summited source back to projects like Apace and GCC.
Basically, try out VPC again, it has come a long, long way. It doesn't even require a separate IP anymore.
I have a TIBook with OSX, and I have to say that both are fantastic.
I'm a long time UNIX user (who like most others also has to run NT at work), having used mostly Solaris and Linux with some dabbling in other variants. I've always been a big fan of the Mach microkernel as well, so for me OSX is a perfect fit. As others have mentioned "fink" is a good way to get started installing some of the more common UNIX utilities, but quite a lot is already there. They also have put some work into making nice GUI's for many common networking utilities like netstat and ping. Imagine being able to set up your mom's box with sshd and be able to fix things remotley!
Another great benefit is that all of the development tols are free - it's a large download to be sure but you can order it if you need to. I haven't gotten the chance to do much development with it yet, but it's nice to have it there. I also love how easily OSX (and really macs in general) support multiple monitors, I have a 21" at home and USB keyboard/mouse all hooked into a docking station (by BookEndz). I just bring it in and I can use both screens for development, or just a single screen if I'm out somewhere else.
One last note is that if, for some reason, you just have to have Word and other MS Office products, they are all there and produced by a totally seperate group at Microsoft. I myself have been resisting as long as possible getting this just on principal, but am starting to weaken - after all, if there is a group at MS with a clue about UI should one not support them? Anyway, having MS Office means that it would be totally feasable to put a Mac OSX box in at work in place of a PC, if you were so inclined.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Answers from an OSX user. /root, /etc, it's all there. However...
/usr/bin but most Mac apps will install in the Applications directory, with user settings in the User/yourname directory. It's a compromise for those of us moving from OS9.
1. The default console is ksh. However, building and using bash is a realtively simple process. Check out StepWise for instructions. In fact, check stepwise for general "How do I..." OS X answers.
2. Most of the 'standard' tools are there. vi, top, apache, sendmail,php. you can build most UNIX apps with a simple recompile and few changes. Most of them have already been built for OSX. AS for the directory structure, yeah, it's pretty similar. User permissions,
3. Apps are kinda tricky in terms of where they install. Many Unix apps will install into something like
4. The toolkit is amazing. I've never seen anything like this simply given away. there are about 25 applications, megabytes upon megabytes of documentation, anything you could need to start developing applications. Want to build an interface for Aqua. It's there. Want to simply create a command line app. go for it! It's defintiely focused on the Cocoa developer. As I've not developed much with GTK/Qt, i can't make an apt comparison.
5. you comment about openness, etc. is pretty much right on. The low level and system level system is open, as the Darwin project. the UI level stuff is closed, including the PDF screen display, alpha blending, 3d widgets, etc. However, the hooks are very well documented and pretty easy to follow for developers. It's pretty easy to see how everything builds in layers.
What's nice about what apple has done is build on open technologies rather than try to enforce proprietery extensions, like Microsoft and their directX or ClearScreen. Apple's response has been, OK, we'll use OpenGL and PDF for our display. These are fully open, cross platform technologies that we're building on, not ramming down your throat. This is repeated time and again when looking at OS X and other Mac Apps. It's kind of nice to see how innovative you have to be when you don't own the world...
That's my bit. Enjoy.
My other computer is your Windows box
In effect, all Linux proper is is an OS kernel. Everything on top of the kernel is something that is bolted on independently of any kernel development. Thus Slackware is the Linux kernel plus "all sorts of stuff Patrick Volkerding added;" Red Hat Linux is the kernel plus "all sorts of stuff they added;" ditto for SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, ad infinitum.
With the BSDs, there's quite a lot of additional "environment" that is tightly tied to kernel development so that you've got a "base system" that is defacto-standardized that is capable of, for instance, recompiling itself.
With Linux, you've got to add in whatever that is needed that isn't in the kernel in order to do that yourself.
With that larger basis of "stuff" surrounding the kernel, a whole lot of the arguments "Red Hat puts the files here; Debian puts them there" just plain go away. The "Linux Standard Base" effort where they're trying to standardize where a bunch of the basic stuff goes and what it does is an effort that would be ludicrously irrelevant amongst the BSD folk; they started off by standardizing the user space stuff that LSB is fighting over.
Then there's Ports. Ports is sort of the BSD equivalent to Debian's apt-get or perhaps the Red Hat-oriented autoRPM . Except with a difference: With Ports, the approach is not to download binary packages, it is rather to download the sources, pull in any patches needed for Ports integration, and then compile it all.
That's got the demerit that it's a lot more work for your poor, overworked CPU.
However, it has the merit that if you compile libraries and packages, together, on your system, with the same compiler, the sorts of "DLL Hell" that people suffer from when they grab RPM files from here and there just can't happen. The libraries will necessarily be compatible with the applications because the applications were compiled with and for the precise set of libraries you have on your system.
This means that if there are any challenges in getting programs to compile, you'll hit them. That being said, since the folks collecting and maintaining the Ports will indeed hit those issues, they're likely to have patches in place so that by the time you see the code, it should compile cleanly.
In effect, the crucial concept involved in all of this is that the BSD packaging paradigm is that everything should be readily compilable and recompilable, from the ground up. The classic "make world" will compile all the base tools, the kernel, all the kings horses, and all the kings men, and what you get at the end is that every single component in the "world" (which is the base system; the stuff below Ports ) has been rebuilt locally.
It's all using Makefiles, and can be downloaded using CVS, so the details are all visible. None of the controversies of "well, the Red Hat kernel compiles include some special patches, and getting at them is a bit challenging...."
Big-time learning opportunity.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Oh man, have you got issues or what? You're only going to give Apple respect when they start shipping Debian as the default OS? Hah! Hah! You need a major dose of reality. Perhaps some debrainwashing is in order as well.
Apple has contributed back TONS of software to the community. The BSD license said they didn't have to give anything back at all, but Apple did. The opened up their entire base OS. They have provided patches, fixes and enhancements to BSD. They work with BSD developers on a daily basis. But all you can do is complain that it isn't Debian. Go crawl back in your hole.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
XP has rock solid stability, better hardware support, multi user ability (including logging on graphically with multiple users - Apple can only dream of that).
And so does OSX. Legendary BSD stability, best consumer hardware bar none, a true multiuser OS underneath. The stability and multiuser aspects have been with BSD for twenty years. The hardware aspects have been with Apple for almost the same amount of time. During that same time period Microsoft coudln't manage to get a stable OS until a few months ago, and the PC platform evolved into the world's biggest kludge.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
top, vi etc are all there. /usr/bin is where CLI programs go. MacOSX GUI programs go into /Applications. This is so that if you don't want to use a command line, you don't see any CLI apps (/usr is invisible to the GUI by default). A Terminal window sees all though.
There is no need for the quotes around "console". It is not some lame DOS ripoff that Apple put there for marketing purposes. Open a term window and you'd be hard pressed to tell it apart from FreeBSD except for directories like /Applications being there.
Yes it is the Dev tools (Cocoa, Carbon, C++ compilers, etc). Side note: When NeXT was selling this, the dev tools were several hundred dollars, $700 IIRC. Apple is GIVING them away. Of couse some here would ignore that and gripe that they're not open source *sigh*. Sort of. The OS and unix CLI stuff is Darwin. It's open and can be downloaded separately for free for PPC and x86. It has no GUI but you can install XFree86 if you want. The rest of MacOSX is only for PPC and is a set of closed source libraries and applications.Yes, you can't change the source. Apple is a NASDAQ company and must make money. They have to keep some things in-house. The Cocoa environment is EXTREMELY good though and by subclassing etc you can override a lot of defaults, not that it's usually necessary though. Apple did a good job the first time. If you want to see how some things are implemented, check out GNUStep, an open source implementation of Cocoa for Linux.
Good, object orientated frameworks mean that you don't have to see the source to have flexibility. Check out the Cocoa docs.
This is something which got a little confused in the translation. What I said was that it took me several months to come to Apple after my initial interviews because a little detour to Wind River happened in the middle (for reasons I won't go into). This somehow got permuted into my spending months chasing the job. In reality, Apple never gave up after "losing" me to WindRiver and their persistence coupled with my desire to get involved with MacOS X is what finally induced me to leave WRS.
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
I may be arrogant, but not for the reasons stated. In the presentation I gave at the NLUUG this year, I was merely being a realist. :-)
I think the essence of my talk was also somewhat distorted by Rob Kaper's summary of it. He failed to mention that my specific "grievance" with open source on the desktop so far lies primarily with its failure to standardize on a single set of "higher level APIs" that ISVs/VARs rely on to bring their applications quickly and cheaply (well, as cheaply as possible) to market. Having a multitude of desktop environments to choose from might be wonderful from an engineer/power user's perspective, but from an ISVs perspective it's a nightmare. They don't want multiple solutions to choose from, they want a SINGLE set of APIs which will enable them to reach all the users in their target market. By APIs I'm also not talking about fopen() and the rest of libc, I'm talking about all the things which enable things like buttons and scrollbars to appear on the screen and for applications to share data between them. Where the open source engineering community consistently "fails" is by making this a technical argument, going to great lengths to point out that things like the WIN32 API and ActiveX are difficult to use, buggy, fraught with security problems, whatever. From the ISV perspective, however, those very same things allow them to reach a user base of millions and are well-documented and "rich" enough in functionality that they can provide a reasonable-enough (deliberate choice of words) user experience to sell their application to some of those millions. From their perspective, that's literally the bottom line and all that counts.
It's a pity that Mr Kaper didn't go to the trouble to describe that portion of my talk since it's where I put the most energy. I didn't want engineers to hear my talk and walk away simply branding me as an anti-KDE or anti-GNOME guy, I'd far prefer that they actually *get the point*. Perhaps that's something you can only do once you've worked for a big ISV who's job it is to deliver mainstream desktop apps, however. Until you've done that, you just haven't really felt the pain of trying to do something like printing or font selection from X.
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer