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Take a Mac User to Lunch
A Slashdot reader writes "LinuxWorld is running a story explaining how Mac OS X may help break down the walls for non-Windows operating systems, including Linux."
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The point of the Apple server is that most people want a server to run out of the box. You, as a geek, probably love to tinker. Thus buying one of these things is kinda pointless.
What happens when you run a large company and want a set of new servers? You look to Dell, Gateway, Apple. Then decide who can give you the better product. Apple is just trying to say "Here, we can sell you a nice UNIX server, with a nice interface on it so anyone can admin it". They seem to be reasonably sucessful doing it as well.
I disagree. Switching to Mac would be painless for almost all users. This has nothing to do with anyone who runs Linux.
For the *average user*:
You can still read and write your Microsoft Office documents.
You can still play your MP3 files.
You can still go to all the same websites with your Internet Explorer.
Those three things alone make it easy for the average user to switch from Windows to Mac.
siri
Have you sat down and spent some time with OS X? There is a lot of quality Mac-only software out there. Plus the fact that it now has UNIX underpinnings means there's a whole lot of native UNIX software for it too (you can run OS X and X at the same time). Mac OS X provides a true UNIX environment with an excellent development platform and graphical shell. It is also arguably the best user interface for a desktop. That plus the vast amount of quality Mac-only software gives plenty of reason to switch. For the record, I use a Mac at work, and a PC running Debian and XP at home. I am very tempted to buy a Mac as my next computer.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Arg. The old (and still incorrect) one-button-mouse sentiment.
Your current mouse is an USB mouse ? Fine. Then unplug it, plug it into your Mac, and Presto ! You're set up to go with as much mouse buttons as you like. MS even supplies utilities for their mice and keyboards for MacOS.
MacOS X and it's core Darwin are based on BSD. BSD is one of the two flavours in Unix. There's System V and there's BSD. So technically Linux doesn't qualify as Unix while MacOS X does. So Apple doesn't have to look at all the x86 boxes running Linux to say they're number 1 in selling a Unix operating system. They only have to look at the other BSD/System V sales.
Have a look at Apple's XServe pages. The basic functionality is indeed quite similar to that of other Unix servers (which is exactly the point that the author of the article was trying to make, I think). The extra's are very nice remote management and diagnostic utilities, ease of maintenance (just slide it out of its cover) and some Mac-specific things like allowing other Macs to netboot from it.
Jonas
Donate free food here
Darwin, the low level system which the GUI of OS X runs on top of, is free and can be downloaded from Apple for no money at all, for both Mac and x86 platforms. The GUI (aqua) and the apps Apple provides are what you pay for when you buy OS X. Apple is using the OSS movement because they have Open Source software in their system.ative is Windows.
When the article says apples sells more "Unix" boxes than dell or hp does that not count linux boxes too ? Is this a misleading statistic
First of all, as lots of Slashdotters love to point out, Linux isn't UNIX. It's a UNIX-like operating system. Mac OS X, on the other hand, is UNIX all the way to the bone.
But more importantly, it's not a misleading statistic unless you choose to interpret it as such. Apple says they ship more computers with UNIX than any other vendor. (I haven't checked the facts here; I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that this is true on its face.) Hardly anybody, in the grand scheme of things, ships computers with Linux on them. People buy computers with Windows on them and then add Linux, or remove Windows and install Linux. So those can't be counted as computers shipped with UNIX for at least two reasons.
Apple may or may not be correct; I think it's pretty darned likely that they did some homework before making such a bold statement, so I'm going to assume that they're correct. They're definitely not trying to be misleading.
You should check out Mac OS X Server sometime. It has really exceptional interfaces for managing things like the web server software; the UIs are a lot better than Microsoft's management UI from Windows 2000, and unlike IIS, OS X Server has pure Apache under the hood. You can either use the graphical manager (you will want to, once you see it) or the same command-line tools and config files you're accustomed to.
That's just one example. You really should check it out.
what part of osx is open source ?
This part is open source.
if it's open source then why isn't it free ?
It is free.
Because in the past, anyone who wanted to work on Darwin had to supply his patches to Apple, the ISC (Internet Software Consortium) and Apple together founded OpenDarwin.org to improve the way Darwin can develop as a stand-alone OS. The reason is that it's now a lot easier to get commit access. Apple engineers still work together with the general public to guide the project and interesting patches will be merged in Apple's Darwin distribution as well (and yes, reversely, Apple's changes are also merged in the OpenDarwin tree).
Jonas
Donate free food here
what are they NOT telling us. well, tack on Aqua and all those apps and $$ for upgrade you got one expensive Apples...
Actually, the OS, GUI, and all of it's apps are included in the price of the server, just like Linux. Major and non-free system upgrades come out every 9 months or so, from $20-$130 dollars which is not generally a major concern for any major server farm. And above and beyond Linux you get an intuitive GUI and great server admin tools.
Can I run OS X software through X? Does XDarwin support gnome? Is the kernel source available, or do I have to wait for apple to support my hardware?
:)
You can run XDarwin (X server) through Aqua. You can run it rooted or rootless. So you can, if you wish, have X apps and Mac OS X apps running side by side on the desktop. Yes you can run Gnome through it (I dont, but it does work). The kernel (the important part) is exactly as it came from BSD - and thus under the BSD license. It is open, and I have seen non-apple drivers for many devices.
Most importantly: Does it have an automated package installer like apt-get?
Yes, in fact there is...its called fink (find it on sourceforge) and uses the same commands you know and love (dselect, apt-get, etc.)
My personal Linux machines were Debian - so I appreciate your want for the simple-yet-still-raw feel that it has. You can get that to some degree.
I Love being able to run MS Word, Powerpoint and multiple vim, ssh etc sessions on the same screen.
Or just hitting an icon and bumping out of the Mac feel altogether and run rooted in Blackbox.
Ximian Evolution is SO much better than Outlook.
Hell I still use pine cause its better than outlook
you can use xfree86 in rootless mode with a three button mouse (the logitech scroll wheels work nicely) and have all your unix apps too.
t ilities/
and theres fink, which lets you use debian style package management (including dselect) for the unix stuff. with the rootless hacked version of blackbox and the dock set to autohide, the setup works like it was meant to be like that, except for the visual devide between unix and mac apps (which looks like the visual difference with classic apps running in the os-9 sub system)
thus you get both.
use a fast window manager becasue xfree is slow on os-x. but with a fast window manager (like blackbox) you dont really notice the difference. the actuall apps (like the gimp) will still run at an acceptable speed.
one more difference, cut + paste in unix apps is still first and middle mouse, but you can cut + paste between X and os-x apps. (for example, highlight in xterm and "paste" into mozilla with either the right click menu or ctrl+v) so that inconsistancy is there but still workable since you have the visual cue (the obviously differently decorated windows)
ive found myself running all my apps under the x server and its still nice (xterms, gabber, gimp, remotely running openoffice.org and mozilla from a debian box etc) (remotely running it so i dont have to merge bookmarks) and it works great. turn off sleep if you have ssh session you want to keep active. for some reason sleeping hangs the ssh session and you have to close that term.
all of this is at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_apps_u
slashdot puts a space in utilities but the link should work.
Another issue that most of the other posters neglect to mention is that just because the OS gets ported to x86 doesn't mean that there will be apps made for it. First off, PPC developers would have to recompile new apps, fixing sticky issues like endian order to ship on the new hardware.
Worse, x86 developers will have less incentive to develop for the Mac OS since they could then argue that such x86 users "can run Windows anyway." I sometimes wonder if Linux products like Wine and the CrossOver plug subtlely discourage developers from making Linux-native software...
Those who complain about affect & effect on