OpenDarwin.org Releases Darwin With Fixes

An anonymous reader writes "OpenDarwin released a 'fixed' version of the Darwin 6.0.2 ISO (the OpenDarwin-20030213 Binary Release) for both x86 and PPC. It is currently installing, so I can't tell you all what works now, etc. Hopefully I can use my old PC box as a server with this..." Apparently, it is mostly a recompile, without local OpenDarwin modifications. It doesn't include perl, pending integration of perl 5.8 ... could this mean Mac OS X will finally have a current perl in the next Mac OS X release?

Comments

Re:But

[jbarket]

MacOS X has always supported mice with multiple buttons.

Way to ask a stupid question that should be obvious. Why don't you email Strongbad and ask him how he types with boxing gloves on?

Re:But

[spearway]

MacOSX support any number of button mouse and scroll wheel out of the box. It is just Apple mouse that has only one button.

No it doesn't.

[LittleBigLui]

Actually, Apple has recently announced that they will only support Zero-Button Mice in the future.

"You know, we're all so sick and tired of the same old one-button-mouse joke, so we'll get rid of that damn button once and for all", an apple representative stated.

Re:No it doesn't.

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Actually, they already do.
If you look at recent apple mices, there is no button to speak of: the whole shell acts as a button.
The change had a funny effect: my mother did not notice anything missing, she just clicked. While some geeks I know where quite startled and tried to find the button.

Re:No it doesn't.

[slux]

We're of course wildly off-topic here, but how much is there to discuss about just OpenDarwin..?

there is some reasoning behind having just a single mouse button. To us computer literate who've gotten used to being able to right click it may seem very limiting but I believe the original reason (and why Apple still has only one mouse button) was that having a second one that is only of limited use is confusing to new users. I can verify this, having teached senior citizens to use a computer. "What's the second mouse button for?" is a frequent question to which I cannot really give an answer because it has none whatsoever at their level of usage. Another problem is that sometimes they tend to click it accidentally. I'm not saying having a second mouse button is a bad idea (I can't since I use it and the wheel daily) but there are reasons to not have it on a beginner's mouse.

BTW, nother thing that is difficult for senior citizens sometimes is getting double-clicks right and understanding why one has to doubleclick the icons while just a single click is enough everywhere else. What's the reason we have those again? Even KDE seems to have finally decided against defaulting to single-click icons in 3.1 at least on my Mandrake 9.1 beta. A shame, really.

Finally, while I've been forced to teach Windows so far, I feel that GNOME 2 would be a lot easier for beginners. There are all kinds of strange features in the Windows desktop. With GNOME I would not have to teach about My Computer and devices that it contains and there is just one logical place to save the user's files into: ~. In addition, there's all sorts of weird behaviour on the Windows desktop that has no real reason to exist (why does the start menu have to hide part of the contents of a folder if it's a little longer?). GNOME is definitely easier to use. My only wish would be is that GNOME would default to having the user's home directory as the desktop and make it function correctly in every case. Someone wrote an essay about it and I can easily see the beauty. In a way, the GUI's "home" is the desktop so why can't the two be the same?

Re:No it doesn't.

[red_dragon]

It'll have taken them a pretty long time to get around to that. Why, they might even have to licence the technology from StupidaMouse.

Re:No it doesn't.

[Oculus Habent]

The problem with the home directory being the desktop is it goes against the filing metaphor. In the truest use of the desktop metaphor, the only things on the desktop should be what you are working on right now.

Apple originally had the best system for this, and it was lost in Mac OS X. You could drag files out of their respective "filed" locations on to the desktop to work with them, and when you were finished, there was a "Put Away" command (Command-Y for you OS 9 and lower users) that would return the file to it's original location.

Put Away really helped the Desktop metaphor by simplifying filing tasks and allowing the Desktop to fulfill its intended function. Unfortunately, it wasn't well documented or pushed in any way, and it was lost.

Returning to the home/desktop issue, if you were to make the Desktop the home directory, clutter becomes a more difficult issue. If I have stuff on the Desktop, I can move it into my directory to organize it, clearing my Desktop for other stuff. If my Desktop is my home directoy, I am always exposed to the filing system of my design - much like always keeping a filing cabinet open in the real world.

The biggest problem the Desktop/Filing metaphor faces, in my opinion, is the inability to leave it. We don't usually keep filing cabinets on our desks, but we can't leave our desktop, so we have to. Microsoft tucked it all under Start in Windows XP, which is simply a clumsy way to make it look more organized while actually adding layers of inconvenience to the interface. My Documents used to be on the Desktop. This is as close to a valid implementation of a filing system metaphor as possible, and they decided it was better under the Start menu.

The Filing metaphor suffers greatly from the lack of transparency in applications. Plenty of different groups have tried to produce an Open Document Architecture (ClarisWorks, Apple's OpenDoc, Microsoft's OLE) that allows you to create a new document and then determine it's contents, but getting people on board was difficult because no one could guarantee the supremacy of their products when it was completely possible to have two different companies software interact. Making software on the basis of cost and quality didn't appeal to many (j/k) so that died quietly... OLE is only really alive within Microsoft's own Office suite.

Microsoft tried a different tactic to start handle the Application problem - the "New" submenu on the Contextual menu. While some people put this to good use, its placement and function was difficult for some to grasp, especially with many users having difficulty with the the nebulous nature of the contextual menu. The New submenu can be a great tool, but it take time to get used to it, and many forego the learning curve in favor of the Start button, which houses all your programs.

Anyway, I'm rambling now, so I'll stop. Basically, I think using home as the desktop would cause more confusion for the typical user, as it breaks the separation of filing and working. While this may not be a problem for Joe SuperUser, it could seriously impair average users.

Also, how do you handle multiple desktops? Will they have the same content? If you have too many files in your home directory to be displayed on the Desktop, will a scroll bar appear? Will you be forced to open a windowed copy of your home directory to conveniently browse it while other windows are open, or will you have to minimize everything? Will the desktop contents flow around docks?

Like I said a minute ago, I'll stop.

Re:No it doesn't.

[Zelet]

The only reason trolls like you mention the "one-button" thing - is because you can't find anything else wrong with them.

Also, some die-hard *nix geeks get pissed because they can't stand the fact that Apple - in only a few years has taken a *nix variant and gone further with it than the entire Open Source community could in 10 years.

Re:No it doesn't.

[RicoX9]

-snip- Also, some die-hard *nix geeks get pissed because they can't stand the fact that Apple - in only a few years has taken a *nix variant and gone further with it than the entire Open Source community could in 10 years. -snip-

Who's pissed? I like OSX. I like the concept, execution (in general). I have not used it on a day-to-day basis. I'd like to. Maybe if they fix the X11 color palette inversion on x86 I'll even install it to play with.

What could the open source community do if someone wealthy formed a company with (more or less) unlimited resources whose charter was to build a great desktop OS with *nix underpinnings and release it as free/open source software? How fast do you think we'd end up with an OSX comparable OS?

What takes so long for open source is that it's a VOLUNTEER effort. People have to eat.

Re:No it doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it prompted her for her credit card number everytime she tried to connect to the internet, she'd probably enter that too.

Re:No it doesn't.

[Lynn Benfield]

why one has to doubleclick the icons while just a single click is enough everywhere else. What's the reason we have those again?

The original thinking was that a single click allows you to select and unselect objects, and a double-click processes the current selection. This was quite logical, and completely consistent up until Microsoft introduced icons that looked just like "normal" icons but which react to the selection click.

Unfortunately I think people who are relatively light computer users are now more confused than ever - quite a common behaviour I've seen in relatives is double-clicking everything (including buttons in dialogs), "just to be sure".

Re:No it doesn't.

[slux]

I can see no reason for having the double-click anymore. What do you need selecting single files for today anyway? You could answer that it is needed for deleting files, accessing a file's properties dialog and information about them. Drag'n'drop covers covers moving and deleting and does not require a separate select-click phase to work.Properties are only accessed through right-clicking and are too, completely doable without the select-click.

One more reason for the confusion is that today, accessing files is done more and more through the browser, everyday computer usage in general is heavily web-based and nothing, including opening files inside other programs, in the browser requires a double-click. The browser is even the same application as the one you use to operate with files in many cases. Also, while you mention single-click icons that Microsoft has introduced (where exactly?), also letting users have quicklaunch icons in the task bar (as done in Windows since Win98, GNOME, KDE, OS X) may have contributed to this.

Perl version

[Draoi]

My TiBook (w/vanilla kernel 6.4) tells me this;

[dhcp1i174:~] pcassidy% perl -v

This is perl, v5.6.0 built for darwin

Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall
[blah snipped]

So, when I check with perl.com, I see that the latest, stable release is 5.8.0. It's not *that* far removed, so why imply that MacOS X is 'finally' getting a current release of perl?

Re:Perl version

[Ranger Rick]

5.6.0 has a number of nasty bugs that (at the very least) 5.6.1 fix, especially in unicode support. Also, Apple built their perl in a way that makes their perl modules go into an essentially unversioned directory, which makes it harder to upgrade perl as time goes on.

The longer they wait, the messier the upgrade is going to be...

Re:Perl version

[jdavidb]

Look for release dates. I was running 5.6.0 some time in the last millenium, IIRC. Ran 5.6.1 for a long time after that. 5.6.0 is two major releases behind.

Re:Perl version

[pi radians]

Ummm, do you mean this upgrade?

Re:Perl version

[Junks Jerzey]

And in all honesty, I was using a Perl from 1998 up until late last year, and (1) I never found any bugs, (2) I never had any other problems whatsoever. Having the latest version could be an issue for webservers, but it's mostly irrelevant in all other cases. Perl is a stable beast.

Re:Perl version

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the upgrade is not actually supplied by Apple, simply "linked to" by a page at apple.com.

There are several third-party upgrades available, of which this is one.

Re:Perl version

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, why not just install the latest version of Perl? Its not that hard.

Re:Perl version

[Anonymous Coward]

I have installed Perl 5.8.0 on Mac OS X, and it can replace 5.6.x. I ran with it for a few days, but then found that the older version of the free Teradata module that I have would not work. The new version of the Teradata module is very expensive, and my organization is moving to a different data warehouse soon, so I'll wait for that and then try 5.8 again.

Re:But

[Znonymous Coward]

I'm on an iMac with a Memorex cordless optical scroll mouse and get this... 2 buttons!!!

hmm

[Khalidz0r]

I don't use apple at all, but what attracted me is the BSD logo there at the topic. Is it some kind of a mistake or is there any relation?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Darwin is composed of the Mach kernel and the BSD subsystem.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

MacOS X runs Darwin 'under the hood'.

Re:hmm

[Ryan Amos]

Take the mach microkernel, then take FreeBSD and put it on top of that and add what amounts to a central registry (NetInfo) and essentially you've got darwin. Apple essentially took UNIX, made it more like modern graphical OSes by adding functionality (not removing) and out came darwin. OS X is one hell of a sleek OS; insanely modular, everything is XML and embedded PDFs yet you can still run most (read: 99.9%) *nix programs with minor makefile modifications. It's BSD for the 21st century ;)

Re:hmm

[Mikey-San]

I direct you to, no pun intended, /Applications/Utilities/Directory Access.

Authenticate and check "BSD Configuration Files". Now you can start using the BSD flat files, like /etc/groups.

If I'm missing something, it's because it's early and even though I'm at my desk, I'm still at home in bed.

-/-
Mikey-San

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

"I direct you to, no pun intended, /Applications/Utilities/Directory Access.

Authenticate and check "BSD Configuration Files". Now you can start using the BSD flat files, like /etc/groups."

That is waaaaay to long and doesn't require as much intimate knowledge of the OS since it is a logical plain english descriptive. These are not the *NIX or BSD ways. Change and accessibility are bad, especially on an OS that is supposed to be easy to use and for desktop use and all that etc.

"If I'm missing something, it's because it's early and even though I'm at my desk, I'm still at home in bed."

It seems you were only missing his change is bad point.

Re:hmm

[punkball]

Yep, exactly. I'm looking for a better unix, not a unix that has been made better for people who don't know unix to use or a unix that has been crippled (is this like when unix replaced multics?!?) to have multiple points of configuration.

I did try that BSD configurations directive mentioned above, but unfortunately it turned on most, but not all of the bsd config files. My honest opinion is that OSX is gorgeous, but not what I'm looking for and isn't quite solid yet. Many apps crashed on me, pgp wouldn't even work (I'd have to buy it for the full version too!) and I just didn't care for apple's own software. If your a unix guy, a good pc is still the way to go. If you don't really know anything about computers but need a good photoshop machine with a cd burner built in, then an apple is just fine.

I prefer the unix route.

Re:hmm

[b-baggins]

I guess all the folks who said Linux was great because there were a zillion and one ways to configure it didn't really mean it.

Re:hmm

[andrewski]

Maybe if you weren't a retarded troll you'd realize that Apple has fixed NetInfo so it checks /etc now. Any changes made in /etc (related to stuff that NetInfo knows about anyway) are reflected by NetInfo. I realize that trolling must take up a good portion of your day, but Apple fixed this with 10.2.

Do I think you are Informative, Interesting, or Funny? NO WAY!

Re:hmm

[geniusj]

If your a unix guy, a good pc is still the way to go.

I'm glad you feel comfortable making that call for every unix guy on the planet. I'm a unix guy and prefer OS X on the desktop, personally.

Re:hmm

[FunkyMarcus]

Flat files in /etc are cumbersome and inefficient, and don't scale beyond a single computer with a handful of entries. For that reason, alternatives have been available for many years. YP, NIS+, and now LDAP are other mechanisms that address these shortcomings - perhaps you've seen an nsswitch.conf file? The functionality is present in any recent Unix[-like] system, the only difference is that Apple has enabled it by default.

Traditionally, these "alternative" directory sources have been a major nuisance to configure. Kudos to Apple for providing a system that relies on proper databases for directory information out of the box. Bonus points for not forcing it down the throats of hobbyists with a single machine and a small handful of users.

Mark

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish OS development was as easy as taking mach microkernel and puting free bsd on top of it. "Next" did the work on mach/bsd platform and made GUI platform with its API called "NextStep". Apple had taken over NextStep years back. Apple was in two minds because of emerging platform called BeOS which was pitching itself as multimedia platform which led apple to be in wait and watch situation. Due to some under-hand or problems Be went under. Apple meanwhile started working on Next again and now its called MacOSX/Darwin. And about XML and pdf thingy, that is called Interprocess communication, where one application talks other via common API and could exchange data in form of PDF etc etc. Every vendor has some form of IPC be it called ACTIVEX/COM/DCOM/.NET or CORBA or XML/PDF etc etc

Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Znonymous Coward]

Which is better? Darwin x86 or BSD?

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Gropo]

Depends on what you need it for... If you want a personal file server for a predominantly Mac household, you might appreciate the NetInfo abstraction Darwin offers.

Other than that, you might get better performance out of one of the tried-n-true BSD's due to the lack of overhead taken up by the message-passing microkernel.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[zangdesign]

BSD. Definitely BSD.

The primary reason for releasing Open Darwin on x86 is as a check for cross-platform coding. The reason it is public at all, is that it generates publicity with the /. crowd and costs them little or nothing in the process. While some Apple developers are putting time into stabilizing the sofware on the x86 platform, very little is being done to actually advance the project in it's current form.

It is not very stable and you would gain no advantages in networking between x86 and Macs by using OpenDarwin, since there is NO gui whatsoever.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[TheCrazyFinn]

Darwin is a BSD

FreeBSD and OpenBSD probably better on x86 though.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Halo1]

Although I agree that Darwin-x86 is only really useful if you want to do Darwin development or use it as a netinfo server, you are wrong about the microkernel piece. It's quite possible that the Darwin kernel is slower than that of the other BSD's, but that won't be due to its message passing microarchitecture. The reason is that the Darwin kernel runs in one address space (even both the Mach and BSD personalities run the same address space).

Apple didn't just pick up the Mach kernel and used it, they improved it a lot and one of the things they did was to rip out all that message passing stuff, while still retaining the modular design of the kernel. The result is that they more or less get the best of both worlds: a modular design with the speed of a monolithic kernel. Of course they did lose the ability of a true microkernel where the whole kernel doesn't crash if one of its modules does.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[JordanH]

• The reason it is public at all, is that it generates publicity with the /. crowd and costs them little or nothing in the process.

Not to mention the fear it inspires in Motorola. I'm sure this goes a long way toward helping keep PPC prices low (for Apple) and pushing PPC performance higher.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Anonymous Coward]

no gui?
How bout xfree86 like every other nix out there ;-)

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[evilviper]

one of the things they did was to rip out all that message passing stuff

Woohoo!!! Why didn't I think of that??? Just rip out message passing! It's genius! Hey, the different parts of the kernel don't need to communicate anyhow. Hey, why would the swapper need to send messages to the hard disk driver anyhow? The system will just use up so much less CPU power that way!

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Leimy]

The reason is that the Darwin kernel runs in one address space (even both the Mach and BSD personalities run the same address space).

Actually the fact that they are running BSD + Mach [the XNU components] in the same addreess space is a speed optimization to reduce context switching for every message from BSD to Mach. This isn't a cause of slowness but a reduction. Can you imagine how bad it would have been if they hadn't done this? This is documented on Apple's website in Kernel programming so I am not just making it up. Its in the section where they clarify that XNU itself is not a proper microkernel.

Apple didn't just pick up the Mach kernel and used it, they improved it a lot and one of the things they did was to rip out all that message passing stuff, while still retaining the modular design of the kernel.

The message passing stuff still exists and is still useful [while it may not be used in the kernel space... I haven't verified this yet.] Walking through the source of CFMessagePort stuff shows you that it calls mach_msg a lot actually. It's also super fast due to out-of-line memory transfers etc.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[geniusj]

Darwin currently has better threading (read: true kernel level threading) in SMP machines than any of the other stable releases of BSD do. But I'm not sure if that's available on Darwin x86 or if it's only ppc. I'm going to guess the latter.

-JD-
(waiting for KSEs to be finished . . .)

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, Apple didn't remove the message passing. It's still there, and you can even write to it in Cocoa with a few lines of code (NSPort).

What they _did_ do was integrate the core kernel and the BSD environment (the core OS) into the same address space, so the core OS itself doesn't pay the performance penalty.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Suppafly]

It is not very stable and you would gain no advantages in networking between x86 and Macs by using OpenDarwin, since there is NO gui whatsoever.

Unless dont count xfree86 with inverted colors

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Halo1]

oohoo!!! Why didn't I think of that??? Just rip out message passing!

I know you're just trolling, but for other peolpe that might be interested: in the original Mach kernel, every subsystem of the kernel talks to the rest by using message passing (which is obviously quite slow, but otoh allows you to keep every subsystem in its own address space). Apple changed this so that every subsystem lies in the same address space, so they don't have to use the slow message passing interface, but can use function calls instead to let different parts of the kernel communicate.

Obviously, the message passing interface is still there and e.g. can still be used to have kernel space code communicate with userland code.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Halo1]

Actually the fact that they are running BSD + Mach [the XNU components] in the same address space is a speed optimization to reduce context switching for every message from BSD to Mach. This isn't a cause of slowness but a reduction.

I never claimed this slowed things down, in fact I said:

It's quite possible that the Darwin kernel is slower than that of the other BSD's, but that won't be due to its message passing microarchitecture. The reason is that the Darwin kernel runs in one address space (even both the Mach and BSD personalities run the same address space).

Now that I read that again, I see how you could interpret it different from what I meant. I wanted to say that although maybe the Darwin kernel is slower than other BSD kernels, message passing [in the kernel] won't be the cause of that, since the whole kernel now runs in one address space (even the Mach and BSD personalities, so even for communication between those two you don't need messages).

The message passing stuff still exists and is still useful [while it may not be used in the kernel space... I haven't verified this yet.]

Yes, I meant they removed it for in-kernel communication. It's indeed possible that it's still used here and there for in-kernel stuff, but the whole communication architecture of the kernel doesn't completely rely on it anymore as in the original Mach. I agree this wasn't really clear from my original message.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[evilviper]

I know you're just trolling,

It's called sarcasm. I guess if you don't like what anyone has to say, you just call it a troll so that you don't have to deal with it.

in the original Mach kernel, every subsystem of the kernel talks to the rest by using message passing (which is obviously quite slow

This is no news at all... They took a microkernel and covnerted it into a monolithic kernel. 'Nuff said.

allows you to keep every subsystem in its own address space

In other words, a microkernel can't be brought down by one single part.

The great thing about microkernels is that a flaw in the TCP/IP stack won't result in an exploit or a DoS on the kernel. So Apple took a microkernel, then removed all the features that make a microkernel a good thing.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Halo1]

It's called sarcasm. I guess if you don't like what anyone has to say, you just call it a troll so that you don't have to deal with it.

I did reply to your post and I did address the "points" that you made. I suppose this was more sarcasm I didn't get...

In other words, a microkernel can't be brought down by one single part.

The great thing about microkernels is that a flaw in the TCP/IP stack won't result in an exploit or a DoS on the kernel. So Apple took a microkernel, then removed all the features that make a microkernel a good thing.

I talked exactly about this in the last paragraph of my original post. Maybe you should spend more time actually reading the post and less time thinking up "sarcastic"responses.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[evilviper]

I did address the "points" that you made.

No, you went off about message passing between userland and the kernel.

I talked exactly about this in the last paragraph of my original post.

Yes you did. What I'm not sure of, is why you call it an improvement, "the best of both worlds", etc.

they improved it a lot and one of the things they did was to rip out all that message passing stuff

In fact, getting rid of message passing doesn't give you anything from both worlds, it gives you a monolithic kernel, plain and simple.

Re:Darwin x86 or BSD???

[Halo1]

In fact, getting rid of message passing doesn't give you anything from both worlds, it gives you a monolithic kernel, plain and simple.

Fortunately, that's not true. I would suggest you to read this and this message posted quite a while ago on the darwin-development mailing list (use archives as both login and password).

Use PC as a server?

[YetAnotherName]

Hopefully I can use my old PC box as a server with this

And if that doesn't work, you might want to take a look at FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, amongst others. I understand they're fairly popular.

Re:Use PC as a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think, that may be the problem.

I'd rather suggest Plan 9.

Re:Use PC as a server?

[giminy]

I understand they're fairly popular.

Right, but a tiny shred of security through obscurity never hurts. I would bet that clueless script kiddiez trying out their latest h4cker software wouldn't be as successful against yet another unix flavor (system calls won't work exactly the same under Darwin as they do under the other *bsds). Kiddiez probably won't bother learning darwin internals just to crack .000001% of the web servers out there. I know folks that run linux on obscure hardware for the same reason...not much risk of worms, kiddiez, and the like.

Re:Use PC as a server?

[Ryan Amos]

Kiddies wouldn't learn them because most kiddies nowdays don't even fuck with *nix. Most skript kiddies don't bother hacking servers anymore anyway. Why hack a single well defended server when you can have backdoors on a hundred Windows PCs sitting on cable modems? Home boxes are easier to get access to (user error, trojans etc) and there's almost ZERO chance of getting caught. Sysadmins tend to be able to track people a lot better than grandma on RoadRunner.

Re:Use PC as a server?

[Frymaster]

I'd rather suggest Plan 9.

now if we could only get seemail and vwhois on darwin we'd be set!

Re:Use PC as a server?

[AusG4]

lol.. you'd think. My Grandma is quicker on the uptake then half the Sysadmins I know... especially with every tenth person on earth holding an MCSE and getting trusted to run a server (or servers)... as if an MCSE is worth even the electricity it took me to write this on my laptop.

Re:But

[grub]

Sig: I can't understand why people who hate Linux and Apple read slashdot.

Microsoft pays them to. It's called astroturfing or sandbagging
Now where's my tinfoil hat, I'm going to miss my bus.

Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think it means that they are about to do a sensible thing and remove Perl from the base, just like FreeBSD has.

Re:Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

I sadly happen to agree. Tools that are upgraded independently of base OS release should not be tied to the OS. Case in point would be Solaris. Starting with Solaris 8, perl is part of basic OS. End results: a) It is compiled with Sun compiler, so it is damn near impossible to compile additional modules, as pretty few people have Sun cc installed (hint: Basic Sun CC costs ~1K USD). b) OS is tied to the idiosyncracies of perl 5.005, and Sun themselves recomment that you do not upgrade perl that is installed.

The most sensible thing to do is compile a fresh copy of perl using the compiler of choice, and then install it into a different directory, and modify the system wide PATH.

Arguably, FreeBSD learned from the complaints of the users, and detangled perl from the core OS. This way upgrading perl is a breeze, and only breaks things you install, not the core OS.

Maybe it's time for more distributions/OSes to either stop shipping perl by default, or at least make sure that nothing depends on spcifics of a perl version, so worry-free upgrading is possible?

Re:Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic Sun CC costs ~1K USD

Shit, for that price I'd want it to write and debug the damn software for me!

Re:Perl

[cryptochrome]

Not likely. Otherwise they wouldn't have ADDED python recently.

IMHO, Apple should adopt fink.

Re:Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

They only added Python and Ruby, becasue THEY ARE GOING TO TAKE PERL OUT. Jesus, accept it already.

Re:Perl

[andrewski]

IIRC, Apple already adopted a 'real' package management system - DarwinPorts.

Current (6.4) Darwin kernel ?

[snowtigger]

Is the latest kernel included ? The one included with 10.2.4 is the following:

uname -a
Darwin computername.local. 6.4 Darwin Kernel Version 6.4: Wed Jan 29 18:50:42 PST 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.26.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

However, the darwin kernel you download from Apple is only version 6.0. Does anyone know where to fetch the latest kernel ?

Accelerated Development

[Anonymous Coward]

The new and improved Darwin is expected to make evolution proceed much more smoothly. Mass extinctions will be less upsetting to surviving species. Individuals without an advantageous mutation will tend to enjoy life longer before being eaten. Sudden changes will be avoided and will instead occur slowly enough to be studied.

Re:But

[kalidasa]

And, amazingly, I have a three-button scroll mouse from MacAlly that works on my OS X machine. But I can also use the one-button trackpad no problem.

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

Bugger... nobody told me. I must be owed loads in back-pay.

Update your Perl. It's easy

[acomj]

I downloaded and built perl for OSX. Perl Version 5.8.? built without a hitch.

Now you don't even need to build perl yourself. Get Fink Macos X version of Apt-get and get a perl binary. (I'm pretty sure one is available). Fink is a great tool for keeping all the gnu/opensource software up to date.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

fink can build the apps for you as well... fink install

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[pi radians]

Or if you want to forget all about fink you can take an even easier route.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[jameshowison]

There is one wierdness.

Due to the HFS filesystem not being case-sensitive if you install libwww-perl (which you will probably do when upgrading to 5.8) then it puts HEAD (a tool for manipulating http headers) in /usr/bin which stomps all over the familiar head.

One to watch out for.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[MalleusEBHC]

While we can debate whether double-clicking a GUI installer or "sudo apt-get install perl" is easier (they are both simple, so wahoo for OS X), I think it is safe to assume that the majority of perl users who want/need 5.8 are also Fink users. The "Conflicts have been reported if you currently have Fink installed on your system." line does make me worry about the kind of damage this may do, so I think it is best that people use the fink installation for now.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[babbage]

For philosophical reasons that I don't entirely agree with, the Fink developers have specifically *not* provided a Perl package in Fink. I just ran a "fink list perl" and this hasn't changed.

Basically, they don't want to replace anything that is already provided by the system, and since so much of OSX depends on having that 5.6.0 version of Perl, they refuse to put a sanctioned Fink version under theie /sw tree. Of course, this doesn't explain why there are Fink packages for Ruby (part of Jaguar), Python (part of Jaguar, also 10.1?), Apache (part of the Public Beta, if not even earlier), or Grep (older than dirt :-) ...but not Perl.

There's a logic to it, I just don't quite agree with it. In any case, the important thing is that there is not a binary version of Perl available from the Fink project. The closest you're going to get is that, if you read the archives of the Fink-users mailing list, there has been non-official package descriptions that you can add to /sw/fink/dists/local/ in order to have your own custom Perl installed by the normal Fink tools. But this isn't & probably never will be something you can get directly from the Fink project itself -- you have to dig for it.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they fix HFS so that it works like the other modern filesystems?

It is the year 2003 you know.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[andrewski]

One of many. This is why I think it is retarded to use HFS+ at all. I find it slow, incompatible, and just a plain bitch. I have a small vestigial HFS+ partition for Classic though.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[Twirlip of the Mists]

While we can debate whether double-clicking a GUI installer or "sudo apt-get install perl" is easier

[bigspender:~] twirlip% sudo apt-get install perl
Password:
sudo: apt-get: command not found

Hmm. Looks like double-clicking wins.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[Ranger Rick]

Actually that is not the reason perl isn't in Fink, it's because we haven't found a good way to provide it without screwing things up for people that have already built modules against 5.6.

A couple of people have proposed solutions, but no one has yet had enough time or inclination to come up with a solution that has a halfway feasible upgrade path.

It is true that perl is not yet in Fink, however.

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[babbage]

Ahh, I misunderstood. I thought that Ken Williams had a working Perl package that hadn't been officially adopted by the project, but I haven't really been keeping up with the mailing lists so I probably missed whatever negative side effects come up from his (or anyone else's) stab at the problem.

In any case, if Darwin is getting an upgrade to 5.8.0, then maybe Jaguar's successor (Panther, was it?) will as well, and the whole debate can become moot. Or at least, until 5.8.1 comes along... :-)

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[Ranger Rick]

There is a working package -- the problem is not with perl itself, but what our upgrade path will be for all of the binary perl modules Fink handles. Making a perl package is the easy part. =)

It looks like one of the core Fink maintainers is working on a 5.6.1 package for now (that will at least be easier, procedure-wise, since it's binary-compatible with 5.6.0) as a stop-gap that will let us transition easier, and give people a considerably less buggy perl than we've got now. Long term it's still undecided how we'll handle it. Hopefully Apple will maybe put out 5.8 with 10.3 or something, and then it will just be a regular part of the 10.3 transition Fink will invariably have to go through.

There's been some unofficial discussion among Darwin folks about waiting for 5.8.1 and then looking into a new perl release, but I don't know how that will get affected by other deadlines and such (or if the people I talked to are even the decision-makers on the issue, for that matter).

[crosses fingers]

Re:Update your Perl. It's easy

[hobbit]

[hobbit:~] ls /Downloads
[hobbit:~] echo "double-click on what?"

Hmmm. Looks like apt-get wins.

jwtfm

[jonnyfivealive]

dangit, another offtopic, but... J Wrote T F M

Re:Current (6.4) Darwin kernel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

build it yourself from the apple cvs... bewarned... the name would besomething like xnu-3024

Microkernel performance

[Anonymous Coward]

...overhead taken up by the message-passing microkernel.

I thought Apple didn't use a true microkernel for precisely this reason.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

...OS X is one hell of a sleek OS; insanely modular, everything is XML and embedded PDFs...

And I thought I'd heard it all: "sleek" and "everything is XML" in the same sentence.

Can I run Mac OS on i386 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

Is there any way that I can run MacOS on my PC ( Pentium ) ?

Thanks
Jason

Re:Can I run Mac OS on i386 ?

[squiggleslash]

Yes, quite easily as a matter of fact, as long as you have a modern ATX system:

First, open up your case. Look for a jumper labeled JP3 or JP27, it's usually somewhere near the IDE bus connectors. Check next to it and you'll see a capacitor.

If the capacitor has a code on it beginning with a letter X, then unplug the internal speaker and the CDROM from the soundcard. If it doesn't, leave well alone.

Once you've done that, remove the entire motherboard, replace it with one from a modern PowerMac, plug everything back in, and install Mac OS X.

Couldn't be simpler!

Re:Can I run Mac OS on i386 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

without emulation, negative.

Disappointing

[eLoco]

I downloaded this but never installed it because it installs to the /opt directory. I was really hoping for a package that would replace the the perl integrated into OS X (/usr/bin, /Library/Perl, etc.)

Re:darwin for intel

[wtmcgee]

no.

darwin is just the backend of everything that goes into os X.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/

as you can see, darwin is just the foundation. on top of that is openGL, cocca, carbon, quartz graphics, etc etc. darwin is basically an apple-modified *BSD.

Re:darwin for intel

[clf8]

No, they most likely rely on Aqua, that nice OS X gui. Apple keeps that to themselves. That, and the fact that all those apps are compiled for the PPC and not x86.

Re:darwin for intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what I was afraid off. My g/f needs to get a MAC (she is in school to be a photographer) and I wanted to set something up till she had the money to buy a good Mac.

Open Source has a problem money can't fix

[Ilan Volow]

Apache and the Linux kernel were volunteer efforts. Those were created pretty fast. Of course, those projects had a developer community that was willing to learn about things like OS and webserver design and placed high values on things like security and stability. You don't currently have such a hardcore developer community on the linux desktop that knows half as much about usability design and places as high a value on your grandma being able to use it.

Last week I had a conversation with the Open Source leader Eric Raymond, one of the people who best exemplifies the open source movement, period. I told him most usability people recommend that you design the UI first and then write the code. He said "they're wrong".

If the open source developer community maintains such mindsets that are antithetical to the creation of a high-quality user experience, they will never, ever have a high-quality desktop OS.

If you have to use money to save our asses from the apathy of open source developers towards the end-user experience, we never really had asses that were worth saving.

A radical attitude debugging session will go further than obscenes amount of money.

What's the point?

[sahmed]

I fail to understand what the point of the OpenDarwin project is. While some apple opensource projects are cool, like the Darwin streaming server, what exactly is the purpose of the Darwin OS. People use Mac OSX for the interface. Without that, what does Darwin provide that can't be had from Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

Re:What's the point?

[TitanBL]

I think you are missing the point. Darwin is not about competing with Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD... It is about Apple being able to port OS X to x86 if they wanted. I know there is tons of controversy over whether or not this will happen, but it is a possibility. This would not be hard to do either - as long as they keep Darwin updated. Dell selling systems with either OS X or XP pre-installed? Ha, unlikely, but Darwin is what makes it unlikely instead of impossible.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point --> Apple needs a free version of the OS to let people like RMS have one less thing to b*tch about. Really it boils down to this... if you are developing anything for Mac OS X like a kernel extention it would be cheaper and easier to maintain a darwin system in theory to do all the work load for testing... also why not have a version that has none of the extra stuff if you just want an apple unix box minus aqua.

Perl 5.8 in Mac OS X default location

[daveschroeder]

Then just use these instructions, provided by Apple, for installing Perl 5.8 in Mac OS X's default location for perl.

Re:But

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they switched to Macs.

Hopefully

[rsax]

Hopefully I can use my old PC box as a server with this...

Or hopefully you could use your old PC box as a server with any of these relatively new operating systems as well: FreeBSD, NetBSD, Debian =P

Backporting efforts

[Stonent1]

It seems to mention old-world G3 systems as being kinda flaky. Since darwin is open, I wonder if anyone has tried to port it to other old-world pci machines? I personally would love to put it on my older PowerMac 6360 (which doesn't work with XPostFacto)and use fink and other things on it. Sure linux works on it, but it would at least be nice to have this.

Re:Backporting efforts

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see the XPostFacto stuff (hacks more or less) be put into the open darwin code base.

Re:Backporting efforts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!
-- Stonent1

Re:darwin for intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what I was afraid off. My g/f needs to get a MAC

To begin with, here's a MAC address for her: F0:00:DE:AD:BE:EF

What's with all this poeple who think Mac(intosh) is an acronym?

Who cares about Darwin?

[evilviper]

Why should darwin get a front-page story for a bug-fix release? I mean come-on... Why not have a front-page story everytime Microsoft releases a service pack?

Darwin is decidely not Open Source per-se, due to the restricitve license, and certainly doesn't have much market share. Come on, was it THAT slow of a news day?

Re:Who cares about Darwin?

[pohl]

Darwin is licensed under the "Apple Public Source License Ver. 1.2", which is on the list of approved licences at opensource.org.

Re:Who cares about Darwin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you are a FSF supporter thru and thru and believe what ever they say (ie APSL isn't a vaid license). However it is an valid open source license to other groups.

Now this isn't a bug fix at all. It is a a qusi-new OS. It takes Apple Darwin and takes fixes from OpenDarwin (which is Apple as well) and creates the first OpenDarwin release.

Re:Who cares about Darwin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... like the Top 10 reason why Google is evil? Sorry this has more front page news worthy than that was. I suppose one could say that Darwin is the only *BSD and UNIX-like OS that is widely deployed on millions of home desktops around the world. Based on market share why would any Linux distro news or *BSD distro news be frontpage worhty?

Re:Who cares about Darwin?

[evilviper]

Does this sound like a good license to you?

2.1 You may use, reproduce, display, perform, modify and distribute Original Code, with or without Modifications, solely for Your internal research and development and/or Personal Use, [...]

IMHO, it's no better than Microsoft's Open Source license, except that you are not required to pay for access up-front.

Re:Who cares about Darwin?

[MochaMan]

Does this sound like a good license to you?

Wow, you do a fantastic job of taking text completely out of context. Try reading and understanding the entire licence next time. Section 2.2 clearly indicates that you may publicly deploy your code so long as the source is also made available.

Before anyone falls for nonsense like what was posted above, I would encourage you to read the licence yourself.

The APSL is an open source licence. A major difference between it and a BSD-style licence is that you have to make your changes publicly available if you distribute binaries. But hey, there are lots of licences like that... the GPL for instance.

Re:darwin for intel

[Anonymous Coward]

i use LINUX, and WINDOWS on my DELL. i wish i could get a MAC though.

If this wins an award...

[jbarr]

is it a Darwin Award?

Re:darwin for intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats with all the people who are jerks? Not getting enough from your hand are we?

Re:darwin for intel

[Anonymous Coward]

also hmmmm www.mac.com takes you to their website and one of their serivces is called .mac hmmm I wonder why people refer to them as Macs.

How about using Hexley for Darwin's topic icon?

[shawnce]

Hexley

update Berkeley DB first

[teridon]

Those instructions note that you'll get an error during "make test" because of the old, buggy version of Berkeley DB included with Mac OS X. If you plan on using perl's DB functionality, upgrade to a more recent version. You can either use fink ("fink install db41") to get 4.1.24, or compile from source (available here) to get 4.1.25. If you compile from source, you'll need to link /usr/local/BerkeleyDB->/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4. 1

OpenDarwin question

[tm2b]

OK, this is tangential but relevent.

Is it possible to take an OpenDarwin install and put the closed source Mac OS X on top of it? I'd love to be able to play with the stuff underneath my Mac OS X install, but don't care to bother if I won't be able to run the pretty Quartz stuff on top of it.

Thanks...

Re:OpenDarwin question

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you do know nothing is really new in OpenDarwin that MacOS X 10.2.4 and the binaries of Apps and libs found on the OpenDarwin page. But to answer you question NO you can not do that at all.

It seems as if you have a disconnect. All the stuff you want to play with is all avaible to you now. Just update to 10.2.4 and download all the non ISO images from OpenDarwin and you are set. Better yet just update and install Apples X11 and fink... they play away.

Re:OpenDarwin question

[tm2b]

Nope. I want to play with modifying the kernel, I already run X11, gimp, etc.

Oh well.

does fink even have a perl package?

[Anonymous Coward]

EOP

Offtopic: Solaris and Perl

[Wntrmute]

The most sensible thing to do is compile a fresh copy of perl using the compiler of choice, and then install it into a different directory, and modify the system wide PATH.

Basically what I do, but I install perl from here. They have versions compiled for older Solaris versions too, and everything's in Sun's pkg format, so it's real easy to manage.

any advantage?

[Suppafly]

Is there any real advantage to be had by running darwin on a pc than linux or one of the various bsd's?

Re:darwin for intel

[bursch-X]

The issue was calling them MACs rather than Macs. Since writing it all capitals would imply that it is an acronym.

A MAC is your network hardware address as opposed to a Mac.

What is your problem?

[hobbit]

NetInfo is always consulted first. Just use NetInfo.

You're not looking for a better unix; you're looking for a simpler unix.

Perhaps you don't understand what's better about it? I can't really take your 'unix hacker' mentality seriously if you're using PGP rather than gnupg.

Mac Bonfire

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac Bonfire!