Slashdot Mirror
Running Mac OS X Binaries With NetBSD
An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about an effort to add a Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer to NetBSD. The project has evidently already made a fair amount of progress, currently working to stabilize the WindowServer emulation portion that will then allow NetBSD to run Mac OS X graphical applications."
Very cool. I wonder if it could be ported to Linux once they've got working okay on FreeBSD. Then Linux would be able to run Mac OS X apps -- the Mac OS X versions of Photoshop and Word come to mind. One major barrier to the adoption of Linux on the desktop is the percieved lack of familiar applications, and Photoshop and Word are high on the list. Word has been pretty well taken care of by the Crossweaver WINE stuff, but Photoshop is still missing. Gimp is great and all, but most graphics professionals would rather keep using the package they're already familiar with than try to learn a whole new one, which is frankly often not as capable as Photoshop.
The point is that you can run Mac OSX, Irix, Linux, Solaris, you-name-ix binary precompiled even commercial software on a PPC machine running NetBSD. EVEN machines that don't support OSX, like that iMac 233 or PowerMac 180 that you have sitting around... Sounds useful.
But, yes- you can only run PPC binaries. M68k or x86 will not work.
lr
I wonder if this could be used to get an increase in speed for running OS X apps without the overhead of the OS X GUI? If it eliminates the eye candy effects, I'd bet it'd be noticeably faster.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Running Gnustep on NetBSD? It has most of the NEXTStep/OS X libs already ported over to Linux (And therefore easily ported to NetBSD)...
GNUStep is already in the NetBSD packages collection, in several packages split across devel and x11. Install it along with WindowMaker and you've got a convincing NeXT clone ...
Chris
Um...I use MOL and have found it to be far from pointless. I use MOL mostly to run a FirstClass groupware client. The reason why I run Linux on a Pismo Powerbook is that I have an environment mostly identical to my x86 Linux machine at home. This means Linux largely frees me from worrying about underlying architecture (Wine and so forth aside). I have not found OSX to be so insanely great that I should blow away my Linux partition. Believe it or not there are good reasons to prefer Linux over OSX.
I have also found MOL to be far more reliable than Classic on OSX. Classic is much slicker in that OS 9 apps run directly on the Quartz desktop and one can cut and paste between apps. This also means it is more complex and therefore failure prone. My boss has no end of trouble with it. Classic icons go missing or change themselves into another apps icons. Some Classic apps will lock and won't release control to the Aqua UI. This means the machine is locked up for end user intents and purposes. Classic inflicts HFS metadata problems and some instability on OS X and kills much of OS X advantages if one has to make heavy use of OS <=9 apps. On the other hand if the OS 9 in my MOL sessions screws up then I can kill it and restart without affecting my Linux session. Since I boot my MOL session from an image I have an advantage normally only associated with virtual PC. If that boot image gets messed up, I can replace it from a backup quickly. Incidentally, MOL is very close to running OS X acceptably...eye candy and all.
MOL is can also be used as a user mode Linux. One can boot another acceptably fast Linux inside a virtual machine. This is useful for things like kernel development. MOL is far from pointless.
Actually, I use Mac-on-Linux pretty frequently. Linux has pretty weak support for HFS+ partitions -- even with the hfstools package. If I ever need to access a HFS+ formatted CD, I fire up MOL, mount my linux Home directory via netatalk, pop in the CD, and copy the needed files.
Most FreeBSD users I know have no interest in Photoshop or Office anymore now that the alternatives are as mature as they are. I think users of any BSD would enjoy this new compatibility, but I think it could be just as valuable to everyone (except MS) if MacOS X gained some compatibility layers.
Their API isn't just emulated, it's already implemented. It's called GNUstep and it runs on almost any *nix platform, and quite a few non-*nixes as well. Most, but not all, OS X (cocoa) applications will run just peachy with a recompile on many platforms.
Darwin with GNUstep implements approximately 75% of the functionality of OS X, right down to the resolution independant rendering (GNUstep uses Postscript, OS X uses PDF).
If everyone is so up in arms about running OS X on their Intel computer, just fucking get Linux or Darwin and run GNUstep. Most freeware for OS X should work just fine if you compile it. Due to the great object-oriented nature of Openstep, you could probably fix any that didn't in a matter of minutes or hours.
I was running GNUstep (with the Ghostscript back-end) and Windowmaker for a while before I got my Powerbook G4.