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Hard Drives Preloaded With GNU-Darwin
proclus writes "A 40 gig Maxtor 3.5 inch, ATA/EIDE hard drive ready to go with GNU-Darwin
OS pre-installed, plus GNU-Darwin Office, plus a full ports tree and
select distfiles. This bundle includes Darwin-6.0.2, GNOME
desktop, AbiWord, PyMOL, The GIMP, gdFortran, parallel computing, and
much more. A triple CDR set is also included.
Available now for ppc and x86 computers. The PPC version includes
OpenOffice-1.0.1 and Mozilla-1.0. Compatibility is as specified for
our OS installer CDs. Check out our updated ordering web page.
(Mirror one mirror two.) You want it."
Wow, didn't anyone see this coming? Sorry we can't ship an OSS system with a computer (thanks Microsoft) but we can ship it on an HD?
Of course, Aunt Em is gunna be pissed when she upgrades and looses everything on her machine and now has to log in to it...
'What's this root crap? I just want my Yahoo!'
All New World Macs boot from a firewire drive
You can get it from Apple's site or from www.opendarwin.org
Nope. No desktop, apart from XFree86 I'd imagine. Apple are not going to open-source their GUI layer (and quite right too IMHO - god knows how crap it would end up if the bad GUI designers of the current Linux desktops started 'contributing' to the design). Darwin is Apple's FreeBSD/Mach 3.0 hybrid operating system and works on PPC (naturally) and on x86. You can get the source code from Apple's Public Source Site and at OpenDarwin set up by the Internet Software Consortium and Apple.
This is just a bad advert for someone's cobbled together install, and an out-of-date one at that. I doubt it's based on Darwin 6.0.2 (basis of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar), the Mozilla included is old and so on...
Finally, one big gripe. The operating system is not called GNU-Darwin! Apple will be very pissed off (as will GNU I hope) at this rebranding of the operating system. Sure, there is a GNU-Darwin Ports structure, but the actual OS has nothin to do with GNU. It's under a BSD-style licence from Apple.
I'm not sure if openfirmware is considered a 'bios' or not, but it gives you considerably more flexibility in this area.
On a mac you can select the boot device at startup by holding down the option key. It even checks to see if there's more than one OS installed on a specific device. I havn't tried USB, but it works great for firewire hardrives and ipods 8). On a side note, does anyone know if openfirmware used in any non-ppc machines?
GNU-Darwin is Apple's Darwin. Or at least a binary compatible re-distribution of it. At least a fork. Frankly, their website isn't completely informative on this issue, but there seem to be three Darwins:
Frankly, I'm a little unclear on the differences but either way calling it a "shitty distro with ripped off GUI graphics" is a stretch. GNU Darwin seems to me to be a GNU operating system built on an Apple-modified BSD kernel. Which sounds kind of perverted, but not necessarily "shit." Hey, they've ported it to x86! It's got to be at least important to x86 as NetBSD.
Apple's lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.
The source is open. Read all about it at Apple's Darwin page. There's nothing to sue anyone over, although Apple can via their license simply "revoke" the source and keep all of the outside changes.
Actually, according to the license, when you take any source covered by the APSL, you're required to register with Apple. If the developers didn't do that, Apple would have a valid case to sue them over. If they did (and I'm positive they did, since they link to the damn license off their page), then Apple really doesn't have anything to get them on, unless they're keeping changes private. If they were doing that it wouldn't be GNU either.
I think your reaction is a little uninformed. A simple websearch turned up quite a bit of information on this topic, even a nice rant from the FSF about the APSL.
--
Daniel
Erm, they do package it on CD (you also get the 3x CD distrib when you buy the HD) or a free download, this is just an alternative way of distributing the software, source and the entire ports tree. It's an attempt to make things easier...... clever that ;)
If you think that just because Darwin works upon Mach it is somehow equivalent to Hurd, you are sadly mistaken. Hurd is not a Unix clone. It is as far away from Unix as VMS was, or as MacOS is. The reason why you can even talk about them in the same sentence is that Hurd can and does sport a unix personality. But Hurd can sport any personality, a Windows personality, a MacOS personality. Because basically its not Unix. It has a much more general API, over which you can host several OS personalities. A Hurd task can be a Mach task, but you can't do that either on MKLinux (Linux on Mach) or Darwin (Basically FreeBSD on Mach). There may be different reasons why Hurd will not thrive but being run of the mill won't be it. Hurd is and will be different.
Any UltraSparc under the Sun uses OpenFirmware.
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
And Darwin is Mach based? So what's that other GNU/Mach system again? Ehmm...GNU/Hurd,
They are very different systems (personally, I think all of the current crop of kernels, including Darwin, have serious design problems).
GPL-purists might argue that the APSL is not a Free license.
The phrase "purism" suggests that you think that this is some irrelevant ideological issue. It isn't. Working with software that has the wrong licensing terms can be very harmful. The KDE project found this out the hard way. And it isn't that the GPL is always the right license. But APSL may have serious problems.
$250 for a 40 GB drive, what a rip-off. $122 for 40GB notebook drive on PriceWatch.... I suggest all steer clear of this get rich quick scheme.
-]Phreak Out[-
No idea on the going rate, but for the interested, here's the original announcement of slashvertisements.
At any rate, Apple probably wouldn't push a GNUStep system; it comes too close to being an OS X replacement.
You are kidding, right? There's a hell of a lot more to OS X than Foundation and Application Kit. It won't be possible to talk about an OS X replacement until somebody comes up with a Quartz/Aqua replacement, and that's not even on the horizon.
I write in my journal
There are hard drive slots that fit in a 5 1/4" drive bay. The slot has a removable tray that will accept desktop hard drives as well as laptop form factor hard drives. Once the drive is bolted into the tray it just slides into the drive bay.
Our hypothetical multisystem vendor could just equip their PCs with these bays with various flavors of preloaded hard drives mounted in the pullout trays. It's literally plug-n-play that way.
The MS Tax was the natural result of Microsofts old OEM agreements. Basically an OEM could not sell the same hardware model numbers or SKUs with both Windows and non-MS OSes. An OEM would have to actually change the hardware config slightly to sell non-Windows versions of it's PCs. Since non-Windows represent small potential sales, this condition sufficed to keep them from bothering. OEMs were probably also reluctant to offend MS since a raise in their privately negotiated price for Windows could be fatal. Microsoft is now legally prohibited from imposing that condition on OEMs but their 90s+ desktop marketshare largely works to accomplish the same thing. Most OEMs still won't offer non-MS or bare PCs, especially laptops. Their are some cracks in this like the Wal-Mart Microtels but their success is not assured.
I seem to recal that the basic instructions for the PPC CPUs are taken from x86, meaning that at a basic level PPC CPUs are x86.
You recall incorrectly. x86 is a CISC instruction set, meaning it has lots of instructions that do many things per instruction. PPC is a RISC instruction set, meaning it has simple instructions that don't do much. It takes more PPC instructions to do the same work as fewer x86 instructions. This is offset by the PPC being able to process more instructions per clock cycle than the x86.
PPC and x86 are no more similar than, say, MIPS and m68k.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong; I probably messed up a detail or two.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
This could be an interesting way to avoid Microsoft tax. Provide the computer with a plug in hard drive and then sell them the HD seperately.
This used to be the case with SGI's and I would love to see this option come back in more mainstream hardware. You could very easily open a panel and slide out the hard drive for reasons of swapping the IRIX distribution or security if you worked in an area where hard drives had to be locked up in safes when not in use.
Of course with new technologies like Firewire, and the ability of Apple Macintosh machines to boot from external Firewire devices as well as CD's etc... this sort of makes this question moot. Plus, with a true plug and play UNIX, I am much happier with OS X than I ever was with IRIX and Mac's are much cheaper than the SGI's.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Mac OS X / Darwin has some very nice features not found on other mature (i.e. not Hurd) BSD or GNU OSes. Although most of these are very technical in nature (mostly deriving from its microkernel architecture), I guess having a stripped, portable OS X could be useful for systems programming.
First, there are places like Audio/Video appliances where an embedded multimedia-friendly (just look at Darwin's IOKit design) kernel would fit very well, without having recourse to more hardcore-barebones realtime OS (i.e. QNX).
Second, being able to test code for x86 portability (and thus, "future-proofing" it) is a worthy goal, even you dont believe that Apple someday will port OS X to x86. (Maybe x86-64?)
But, from a user perspective, you are right as there is probably no point is using Darwin over other OSes.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
When people say "Apple's license is bad", they aren't saying "Apple has an obligation to change their license", they are saying "users shouldn't rely software with that license because it is disadvantageous for them". That has nothing to do with philosophy or purism, it's a simple, legal warning, not much different from a product safety warning someone might release for a stroller or toy.
but that's not what drives companies in a capitalist environment.
Who cares? As a consumer, I don't have an obligation to make Apple rich by using their software under unfavorable licensing terms. Free software also is subject to market forces, and if Apple can't create a free software license that is attractive enough, then Apple's free software will not catch on. And that's exactly what's happening.