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Apple and Linux Beneficial to Each Other?
viewstyle writes "There is an interesting commentary on eWEEK discussing the 'synergies' between Apple and Linux after visiting LinuxWorld. It makes a good point that advancement of Linux is good for Mac OS X and vice versa, because of the ease of porting across the platforms (soon to get easier with the X11 on Mac OS X)." Next thing you know, most of the Slashdot editors and programmers will be using Macs ...
X has been available on OS X for about a year. With XDarwin and OroborOSX it's about as perfectly integrated as it can get. Most X programs will compile just fine (and the ones that don't more often than not the problem is with the configure scripts.. rewrite the makefile and it works) I use gvim as my text editor and other X programs with relative frequency. OS X really is the best of both worlds IMO.
I've been running both OS X & Linux boxes at home for the last 10 months. I can and do use both hardware and software as common elements, from drives & PCI cards to mail, music, browser and office apps, etc.
For me, these boxes are extensions of each other, not competitors, and I've come to think of them as one environment.
MySQL on one...MP3s and image db's on the other. Apache and PHP on both...DVD's play on both... TV on one...DVD authoring on the other. It continues to delight me that I can expand and build as they both mature. This effort started out as an experiment. Now, I wouldn't consider just running one box or one system.
The beat goes on.
though, not all penquins live in there. though it's true that there are penquins on the cold continent, there are also warm weather penquins in south america, and south africa. natively however, no penquins make their homes in north america (unless i misread my source)
I write code.
one of the best *nix apps sights out there:
http://fink.sourceforge.net
I'm currently running windows maker on top of aqua
kiyote
You mean you want the Sorensen video codec on linux, not the crappy Quicktime player.
Tell me in what ways Apple has been beneficial to the opensource movement (not just Linux).
KHTML and Rendezvous are two biggies that come to mind, but that is not the point. I don't get the people who always whine, "Apple has taken foo and hasn't given anything back." Nowhere in the BSD license does it require Apple to do anything opensource, and in the GPL they are only required to released the code they used to augment GPL'd programs. Apple has done exactly what they are entitled to do with the code. You can't give something to someone and then cry even though they followed the terms you set forth.
1. I believe you can add GPL on top of BSD license.
You can add whatever you want on top of code that has been BSD-licensed.
2. Apple used the BSD operating system , not the BSD license (or did they use both?).
Apple used the Mach microkernel and the FreeBSD userland with a little bit of NetBSD to make Darwin (the kernel for OS X). Darwin is considered a member of the BSD family. Much of the code they used to make Darwin was BSD licensed, but there were also some GNU tools like gcc. The Darwin kernel is released under the Apple Public Source License.
I could build an x86 box with the same power for 1/4 of the price.
Dual processors? DDR RAM? ATI Radeon 9000 (or GeForce 4 Ti) graphics? Audio I/O? Gigabit Ethernet? FireWire 800 and FireWire 400? DVD-RW burner? Built-in 802.11g and Bluetooth?
Maybe you could build a machine like that for $500. But it wouldn't be easy, no sir.
I write in my journal
Apparently you've not heard of GNUstep. GNUstep is an implementation of the OpenStep API and includes most of Mac OS X's extensions.
:)
The GUI builder is almost done (I am the pricipal developer of it).
Take a look at http://www.gnustep.org.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Very true, penguins are native to everywhere in the southern hemisphere.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
But Apple has made the system much more proprietary and non-standard than it needs to be. The system administration database is different from mainstream UNIX systems made integrating the Macs into my home and work networks much more work than a Linux machine. The window system is completely different from UNIX, hard to port to, and rather sluggish. Apple's software package management is worse than even that of Windows. And the commercial software situation on Macintosh is not all that great either. A big disappointment, too, was that Apple had promised "free .Mac service with every iMac" and then started charging less than a year later.
Altogether, I think Apple has benefitted quite a bit from UNIX/Linux compatibility, by promising a no-hassles Linux-like environment and attracting some UNIX and Linux users. I don't think they really have delivered, and I will probably not be upgrading my Macs--I can get better functionality and more software for less money with Linux. On the other hand, Linux has not benefitted directly from OS X: there is little or no useful software that Apple has donated to the Linux community (Darwin is more of a distraction), and I don't think Apple's "switch" campaign has been all that effective.
I think in the long run, Apple will be forced to become more and more Linux compatible, and then maybe there will be more benefit to the Linux community. Until then, every Windows user that moves to Macintosh is still of some benefit to the Linux community.
chess.tgz on Apple's site. It's right there for the taking.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Force quitting XDarwin doesn't work? You should be able to kill -9 the processes accessing it and it'll die gracefully (if not, force quit it.) True, it's not terribly graceful, but it can only get better.
As mentioned in other posts, if the file format had been open and documented there would not really be an issue. However, since legacy formats are starting to punish businesses with real costs, the issue can no longer be ignored, even by those that don't/can't plan ahead.
DMCA and EUCD are two additional reasons for migrating from legacy formats. These two could legally prevent businesses (and agencies) from accessing their own documents if encoded in undocumented, proprietary formats and the tools to manage these formats are no longer licensed.
Chip, yes, but it MS-Office revenue will collapse like a sand castle when it goes -- but that's a separate thread. Since Microsoft has alrady taken a publicly stated position against the open file formats, the collapse will only reduce the overhead costs of businesses, agencies and citizens.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
In fact you can (and I have done so) write a RTF document with nothing but a text editor (although it's not the most pleasant of things ... but that's not the point :). It supports just about everything .doc does - including footnotes, endnotes, margin spacing, layout, etc.
So the "open file format" issue can't be all that's behind the lack of good open-sourced office suites!
I had similar problems with Matlab and OroborOSX. The worst was that OroborOSX wouldn't start up reliably, so that starting up Matlab would often be a half-hour ordeal. In addition it tended to crash semi-randomly, which meant I had to go through the ordeal almost every day.
In the end, I found a way to use Matlab with Apple's X11 beta here at this site. This solved all my problems. Matlab starts reliably and faster, doesn't crash, opening and closing windows works fine, and it's still well-integrated with OSX. All it takes is installing Apple's X11 and making a few small changes to .xinitrc.
You should try it out. Hope this helps.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Technically, cocoa is an implementation of an open standard: open-step.
Darwin is heavily modified version of the Mach system, it includes elements that do not exist in Mach, like the driver system, IOKit.The fact that darwin does not run on your hardware is irrelevant. The fact that can't or don't want to use the code that is open sourced does not change its value.
If safari is such a poor browser, why would like the source code? Or do you mean that because the browser is of low quality it should be open sourced? You are right, and the reason is simple, the BSD component of darwin is not recent at all. Basically Apple is still catching up, so they hardly have any improvement to give back and can only find a few lingering bugs. If when apple will be using current BSD code and won't give back its improving, then complaining will be justified. Ok, here we go again:- Gcc (altivec and objective-c related code)
- Quicktime streaming server.
- CDSA.
- Open Play.
- Netsprockets.
- Rendez-vous.
- Header doc.
While they were required to give back the changes for gcc because of the license, for all the others projects, they did not have to. The element that will probably be used first by Linux systems is rendez-vous. Whenever the other technologies will be adopted is an open question.The changes are a reduction of "sleeptime" since Apple X11 is faster, a change to what we "grep" for, and of course the "open" call to X11.app. Apple X11 is a lot faster and stabler for me than XDarwin/OroborOSX. If you prefer not to switch to Apple X11, at the very least you should update OroborOSX since the version distributed with MATLAB 6.5 is several releases old.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
And I'm still waiting for Apple to release the source code to their GNU Chess port, dammit.
You're currently modded "flamebait" for this post. Maybe it's because you would rather rant than research? I found Apple's source for chess here. Hope that helps.
--
$tar -xvf
Alternatively, you could write your Mac app in Cocoa and port to Linux with GNUstep.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
You can check out the merges the KDE folks have made to CVS from code apple supplied with Safari here
Twirlip:
Just so you know - even when pointed to the KDE cvs logs, where one can see the SAFARI_MERGE branch, this corebreech guy still claims the code isn't being released.
You just can't reason with some people, I guess.