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Hard Drives Preloaded With GNU-Darwin

Posted by timothy on from the hurd-drives-next-year dept.

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."

5 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. OS Pushing? by Graelin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!'

  2. No Desktop, and it's not GNU. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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    This is just a bad advert for someone's cobbled together install, and an out-of-date one at that.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.

  3. Re:seems pretty pointless by Maskirovka · · Score: 5, Informative
    You plug them in and boot from them, and you get your complete environment. However, unfortunately, most BIOSes don't support that yet, so the best you could do right now is to use a DOS or Windows chain loader.

    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?

  4. No by fusiongyro · · Score: 5, Informative
    Note that this is GNU-Darwin, not Apple's Darwin.

    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:

    1. Apple's Darwin.
    2. GNU Darwin, and
    3. OpenDarwin.


    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
  5. HURD != Darwin by anandsr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.