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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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Well, as one who runs multiple platforms and multiple os' thereon, I must say i have found it to be extrodinary. I have 3 pc boxes running some combination of 4 or 5 os' and 2 TiBooks and an imac running OSX10.1.
I am, as a direct result of OSX, dumping all but one of the pc boxes completely (and adding a new G4 Tower (need that DVD burner)). I'll keep one just to have a strong box to run the occasional game *not* emulated (for obvious reasons). I have no need for the others any more...quite frankly, OSX simply runs rings around the vast majority of what is out there for day to day use blended with abject power.
Just great...and way to much fun to play with....
/rootrot
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.
seems hard to believe that he had to struggle to land the job at Apple, as such a prominent OS developer. I would have thought that the more successful/visible open source developers would have their pick of jobs at any firm... and Hubbard would be especially well suited to work on OSX, since it's based on freebsd. i bet he's just being modest...
Gaming? Real gaming takes place in a text window. Mac's got those too.
Only thing I'm missing is apps with hidden extensions that auto-launch from my mail apps. I don't really miss them that much, though.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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
Essentially, I spent the last ten years of my life shackled to Microsoft products with the all-too-infrequent practical use of Linux. As Microsoft's business practices continue to get ever more predatory, and the Microsoft operating systems become increasingly marketing tools rather than productivity tools, I decided that it was about time to try something new.
I found an inexpensive, new iBook, and bought it. An "icebook" with a 500Mhz G3 processor, I've been quite happy with it so far. The construction of the iBook is quite decent, with a few common blemishes in the casing and a few mechanical defects reported. However, the real shining star of Apple's lineup has got to be OS X. This BSD alteration (Or enhancement, or bastardization, or annexation, call it what you will.) is positioned in the perfect place to bring intelligence back into the use of personal computers. Functionally, OS X is a wonderfully complex yet artistically presented program interface which does an admirable job of concealing the true nature of things from the average Macintosh transitional user, while providing an extremely high amount of flexibility for the more technically oriented. With the Macintosh userbase, there's actually a very devoted core that could use the help and assitance of open source efforts despite the problems with Apple in regards to certain areas of the system. (The interface, primarily)
Projects suck as Fink, an excellent tool for porting unix applications to the OS X environment are a great start, but what will really help Apple prove a real challenge to Microsoft is the conscious effort by Open Source developers to port applications to Apple hardware so seamlessly, that the average user won't even have to know that The Gimp was actually a unix application.
This is where Apple has succeeded as a core business, making computing simpler for the artistically, rather than the technically minded. The best thing Open Source can do is aid the Apple userbase in proving that the Mac is a viable alternative. Yes, Linux and BSD themselves as well as all the other systems out there, deserve to continue to be the primary focus of most efforts. But it just may be that the most effective way to open up the operating systems market will be to back the entrenched underdog.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Further, you need to do more research about your arguments. Open source zealots may never bother to check copyright law, but companys really -have- to defend their copyrighted stuff every single time. If they don't they risk losing the rights to it. In addition, Apple -doesn't- own the Sorensen codec: they license it. They can't control whether or not it is open sourced. Finally, your arguments about aqua and other core technologies are ludicrous. People should be very clear: Apple is a commercial company, which means they need to make real -money-. If everything is free, why would anyone pay for the OS? What would cover development costs. The OS is comparatively cheap, because of hardware, but it is still the corner stone of Apple's business. People can get the base Darwin for free, just like linux. If you want the extra stuff Apple worked so hard on, you're just going to have to pay for it.
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.
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.
I'm a diehard Linux geek, and I find OS X quite to my liking.
I recently bought an iBook with OS X. At first it was meant primarily to be a secondary console, and an experiment in the Macintosh world. But recently I've found myself using OS X for more and more of my daily computing.
OS X is not without its flaws; the package system stinks, the X server (XFree86 port actually) is a little slow, and porting applications can be a bit of an inconvenience, but the environment is pleasant to use, and the underlying UNIX system is easily accessible.
After installing bash, XFree86 (XDarwin), GTK+, GIMP, and XEmacs, OS X leaves little to be desired.
OS X goes all out with antialiasing; almost all fonts rendering is antialiased, which makes Web surfing and document reading much more pleasant. The graphics system certainly takes a toll on the system's performance, but in my opinion it's worth it.
Please do not judge OS X from versions prior to 10.1. 10.0's performance was horrible. It has gotten much faster.
Apple: PLEASE bring back springloaded folders -- OS X needs them!
-John
Linux runs just fine on modern Macs.
I recommend Yellow Dog Linux, in particular.
Macs are basically PC hardware with PowerPC processors instead of x86. For instance, my iBook has an IDE hard drive and an ATI Rage 128 video chipset (which XFree86 supports). The audio chip is a Texas Instruments part. Documentation is available from TI, and there is a Linux driver.
-John
"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." --Matthew v. 43-48.
- Dan I.
I use FreeBSD at work. It's awesome. I also use OS X daily at home and at work. And really, I can't see much difference between the Darwin core (pure opensource) and FreeBSD in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, except that several of the utilities and bsd apis are dated (no localtime_r, for example). That's not a big deal really, it's Apple's goal to keep Darwin in sync with FreeBSD, and anything that you are missing (as an application developer), there's not too much stopping you from getting sources and compiling it yourself.
My point is, Apple is shipping a fully capable open source OS. I'm talking about Darwin, not OS X. This is what Jordan is working on. If anything, it aims to succeed FreeBSD. FreeBSD is nice and all, but it's got everything that makes a modern Unix, which is exactly what keeps its market penetration small. It doesn't have the attention that Linux has to keep it growing.
The difference that Darwin has is the incredible number of NEW ideas that make a NEW OS. Darwin isn't just another BSD. Apple has learned a lot having several OS projects fail (you have to admit, you do learn a lot that way), and the good stuff has gotten into the Darwin core.
There are things like XML and Unicode support at the base level of the OS. XML is used to describe everything in the sytem, it's basically the conf file format of OS X for everything that doesn't have too many legacy dependancies (for example, fstab is still there, but from what I can tell, it isn't the source of the information at boot time- NetInfo generates it. mount et. al will use fstab still). High-level, object-oriented frameworks are available with at the base level of the OS through CoreFoundation. CoreFoundation is basically the core of the OpenStep Foundation framework without Objective-C. It's pure C. Everything in the core of OS X is written with CoreFoundation- it provides the XML and Unicode support (this means kernel modules, etc). Every string you use is a Unicode-capable string. The powerful array and dictionary 'classes' you use can be converted to and from XML (simple data archiving and unarchving, and human readable too). And you can download and install CoreFoundation onto Linux/FreeBSD if you want to.
I can hear people in the background yelling 'OMG! They're butchering BSD!' No, their upgrading and replacing some very old systems with new ones. They're replacing them with things that fit the needs of modern workstations, not just servers. Things like 'ls' and 'more' aren't touched. They're user utilities, and pretty irrelevant at the OS level (and fairly irrelevant for Apple anyway, because a cool ls isn't too useful in OS X).
You can check out Darwin yourselves from www.opensource.apple.com. You'd probably have more fun with Linux/FreeBSD for a few years, though. While Darwin doesn't have everything it needs to make a long-time *nix user happy, it does have everything it needs to bring all the power of Unix to the masses.
Even before Rhapsody was remade into Mac OS X, I remember Mac OS Rumors article about a rumor (surprise surprise) that what is now Darwin would be available free to universities, simply because Avie Tevanian wanted to give back to the community (as the BSD license doesn't force you). Well, they gave everything back to everyone, and then some.
I'm not saying that Apple is all good, but so many people really underestimate what Darwin is and what it stands for.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
His speech basically came down to "open source failed to do anything on the desktop, and without proprietary, commercial vendors like Apple it will never go anywhere either". He almost sounded like he ment to say "only Apple can make UNIX a success on the desktop", but he explained all he ment to say was open source couldn't, when I asked him about that.
Martin Konold, who like me was present to hold a speech about KDE, responded that KDE already deliver all the stuff Jordan Hubbard was talking about, even before OSX was on the shelves.
The "open source developers can only developer for themselves and never think of end-users" view is just not true. GNOME and KDE prove that every day. Knowing these projects only exist respectively 5 and 4 years, while Apple (and Microsoft) have been in the desktop market for a much longer time gives me plenty of confidence and hope that open source can definitely bring UNIX to the desktop. Just imagine what KDE X (pun: OS X) and GNOME XP (pun: Windows XP) will look like.
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
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a skunk works somewhere inside apple with this already being worked on, but not because Apple is all of the sudden going to become a software company.
Apparently Jobs was mighty pissed at Motorola because the PowerPC chips weren't scaling (in terms of Mzh) as quickly as the x86 machines. There were rumors that if things continued at that rate that Apple would switch its machines over to an x86 arch. (with maybe Transmetta for laptops). Now, assuming that was true I wouldn't have expected the new systems to have been standard x86 machines. I would suspect they would have been incompatible with WinTel boxen. Apple is a hardware/software company and would want to control the hardware platform as well.
Since it looks like Motorola has solved some of the speed issues (the new G5s are supposed to be blazing if the Reg is to be believed) I doubt any x86 port of aqua would ever see the light of day.
Now people have known that BSD was going to be the core of OS X for at least three years. To create this false "Apple vs. Open Source" strawman merely to knock it down is lazy writing, and this late in the game it's actively insulting for anyone even remotely familiar with BSD or OS X. This is "Look at me! Look at me!" writing that needlessly draws attention to itself, something real writers don't need to do.
Indeed, this paragraph mars what is otherwise a reasonably adequate column. But at least it's not as irritating as the average Jon Katz column. Speaking of which, I see that more votes have been dropped from the dump Katz poll. The numbers don't even add up anymore...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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
The propietary hardware will always hold me back from a mac. I like having the ability to install any OS on my machine.
Nice nonsequitur.
And what machine runs "any OS"?
My TiBook has MacOS X.x, MacOS 9.x, Darwin, Windows 98 (via VPC).
If I wanted to I could install various distros of Linux (PPC and, with VPC, x86), but with OSX's Unix underpinings I don't need to.
I'm currently running VPC v4.x. If I were to get a copy of VPC 3.x I could load Solaris and BeOS (support was removed with version 4). But I've no need for them.
A quick check at Emulation.net shows a variety of emulators. I counted 34, plus emulators for game consoles, calculators, and handheld devices.
I have no idea if those emulators are useful. The only one I've used is the PalmOS emulator.
Even with this there are plenty of OS's that I can't run. MPE/iX and OS400 are two that I've worked with in recently.
Please tell me what machine can run any OS, and where I can purchase one. Theoretical Turing Machines don't count.
Steve M
Apple at least has a chance to push past that and get to the meat'n'taters of selling apps built on a real multitasking protected memory O/S. Building on 'nix clone was a biz decision, not a political one. MicroSofts unity of vision (at least as presented outside the company) gives it enormous advantage over what should be an insurmountable enemy of open source fanatics working their asses off for nary a penny. Except for Divide and Conquer. MicroSoft didn't have to divide the 'nix community, its quite capable of doin' that itself... of shootin' itself in the feet, kneecaps and elbows.
Here's hopin' that a strong market presence can bring some unity to the open source community, even if it is starting off with a few baby steps.
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.
I always love reading Slashdot posts about Apple because a thousand people who haven't even touched a piece of Apple hardware in 5 years come forward and bitch. Yes, the Macintosh is a propietary platform, yes, the hardware is more expensive. The fact of the matter is though that there isn't a better end user experience in the world.
Hey kids, you get what you pay for. Remember that little blurb about Linux only being free if your time is worth nothing? It's true and no computer commercially available today is as fast and easy to get rolling as a Mac. It might not be the king of the benchmarking circuit or the cheapest possible solution but the people giving their money to Apple aren't flushing it down a toilet as some would like to have you believe.
One aspect of OS X that seems to have gone largely underreported is the decision to distribute developer tools with the operating system. The developer tools include the Project Builder IDE and Interface Builder GUI constructor, as well as gcc, gdb, cvs, make, perl, and the Java JDK.
The integration with Java is alone remarkable; full Cocoa bindings means that your Java applications are no-less "mac-like" than apps implemented in c/c++/objective-c. The file-bundle structure (executables are packaged in hierarchical directories with resources and XML files providing metadata) completes the encapsulation: a Java app looks and launches just like any other.
On the other hand, you can double-click ".jar" files, and programs that use AWT or Swing, and run them as well.
Providing the facility to write first class programs "out of the box" is an important, if unheralded, aspect of Apple's "open" philosophy. It's a form of user empowerment. It may not go far enough to please the proponents of some open source ideologies, but for the great majority of personal computer users it represents more freedom than they know what to do with. I think it could have a significant effect in introducing people to programing. IANA Windows programmer, but my impression is that the barrier to entry is considerably higher.
LOL! Doing something like this has been the holy grail of the open source desktop environments, and I think you trivialize both their work and Apple's work with that statement.
I also don't know where you get the idea that Apple "ditched development and server utilities". Yes, the DevTools are on a second disk, which you can optionally install. This isn't a bad idea since <gasp> many desktop users are not developers. So how are the server utilities crippled? The primary difference I see is that in OS X if I want to start up my Apache server with typical settings for serving my personal webpages, I open System Preferences, click on Sharing, and click the Start Web Sharing button, only needing to pop a terminal for tweaking the server, most of which I could probably do in a GUI text editor like BBEdit Lite.
Finally I must point out that having a system that they could mistake for a weird version of windows (not exactly the model interface itself) when used only for opening one application is not an achievement of the magnitude of having a system that they could have painlessly setup and configured all aspects of themselves.
If you want to setup servers, compile all your apps, muck around with source code, or uber-tune your window manager interface, then yeah, Linux (or bsd, or whatever) will be complicated. Take all that crap away, and setup a system with a standard graphical interface, and it can be just as easy and friendly as a Mac.
Or you could build Mac OS X, and have a system that lets you do the vast majority of your work easily, including GUI tools for development and servers, and lets you pop a terminal for any tweaks you might need to do under the hood. Lets face the fact that Linux can not be as easy as Mac OS X in terms of total experience, that's not what it was designed for, although open source desktop environments may get it there one day.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith