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Darwin 7.0 Released

Trollaxor writes "The source code to Darwin 7.0, corresponding to the lower levels of Panther, is free for download less than 24 hours after the new Mac OS X v10.3 release! Check out the Darwin FAQ and the Darwin Q & A to get acquainted with this Open Source BSD operating system."

30 comments

  1. Fast by Luzumsuz+Lazim · · Score: 1

    Good work!

  2. Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 1, Troll

    I cant believe Trollaxor got an article ;-) Goes to show that trolls are listened to when there's an article.

    ObOntarget: So, is there any interesting tidbits in Darwin that's not in Linux? Or is it bragging rights of Apple?

    --
    1. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by csoto · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not so much bragging rights as an effort to keep the Apple Public Source License above the fray. It's a "quasi-free" license (as in "free speech"), but still "kind of proprietary." By giving up the "free" stuff almost in sync with the "$129 stuff," they're saying they truly believe in open source software.

      (sort of :)

      --
      There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
    2. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, the Apple Public Source License (APSL) has been Open Source since version 1.1 and considered Free by the Free Software Foundation since version 2.0.

    3. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by sakusha · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sure, there's lots of goodies in Darwin that aren't in Linux. The most significant is Darwin Streaming Server, a/k/a QuickTime Streaming Server, which Apple has generously given back to the Open Source community. It's been ported to RedHat and other platforms since the first release of the source.

      But more importantly, Darwin gives everyone access to the low level internals of OS X. I've seen several bug fixes come from Darwin coders and incorporated back to the main codestream. For example, in the early days of OS X, the SCSI code was broken so ElGato rewrote the SCSI kext and released it for free, giving guys like ME with legacy SCSI hardware a solution, until Apple could incorporate that fix into the next release. This may sound like it's just a way for Apple to capitalize on the work of the Open Source coders, but it's significant in that you don't have to wait for Apple to fix bugs. And isn't that supposed to be one of the big advantages of OSS?

    4. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by csoto · · Score: 0

      Yes. Apple's efforts to co-release Darwin with X are part of their commitment to improve their "open sourceitivity" (to paraphrase da Shrub).

      --
      There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
    5. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by Lars+T. · · Score: -1, Offtopic
      Odd enough, the link under his name goes to his Macslash user page, showing 15 submitted stories, 3 in the last 3 days.

      Hrrm, the latest craze: Frist Sroty about X! ;-)

      --

      Lars T.

      To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

    6. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Trollaxr is an editor at MacSlash.

    7. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by op00to · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      ... so you're saying that the "lots of goodies in Darwin that aren't in Linux" consist of one crappy proprietary turned open streaming media server which really is useful only if you've got their proprietary media player or mplayer for linux...which was ported to Red Hat.....

      Right.

      Why should anyone care?

    8. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by sakusha · · Score: 2, Informative

      Dear Mr. Troll:
      DSS also supports nonQT formats like MP3 and MP4, and can run on QT for Java and other nonproprietary clients. You should only care if:
      1. You're in the business of producing and transmitting media.
      2. You're a Linux bigot that is jealous you don't have this capability.

    9. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by op00to · · Score: 1

      Dear Mr. I don't know how to read:
      I was merely pointing out the contradiction in the parent's statement.

      Let me highlight the contradictory statements:
      Sure, there's lots of goodies in Darwin that aren't in Linux. The most significant is Darwin Streaming Server, a/k/a QuickTime Streaming Server, which Apple has generously given back to the Open Source community. It's been ported to RedHat and other platforms since the first release of the source.

      I basically said the following:
      Ok, so there's this proprietary format streaming server that can also stream mp3's. But it's available for Red Hat Linux.

      So, I ask you, how can something which is available for Red Hat Linux be considered not "in Linux"? Surely, the parent didn't mean only in the kernel.

    10. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by sakusha · · Score: 1

      Dear Mr. Deliberately-Obtuse Troll:
      QTSS is not part of any Linux distro. At this time, QTSS 4.52 is not available for any platform but Darwin and MacOS X. Older versions are not part of any distro. Therefore, it is not "in Linux."

    11. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by op00to · · Score: 1

      The latest version I could find source code for is 4.1.3. Boo hoo, I'm off by a few versions. Let me go install this on my LINUX BOX.

      Releases: Streaming Server 4.1.3

      * Mac OS X, v10.1.3 and later (server and proxy)
      * Red Hat Linux 7.x (server and proxy)
      * Solaris 8 (server and proxy)
      * Windows NT Server/Windows 2000 Server (server)

    12. Re:Heh Heeeh heheehhheehee by Tisephone · · Score: 1

      I could have sworn the real deal was "Trollax0r".

      --
      "Neque enim lex est aequior ulla, quam necis artifices arte perire sua."
  3. Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    That GNU-Darwin people decides not to link to "proprietary" libraries is, of course, a result of them using the GNU Public License so extensively-- and now the primary supported Darwin platform is not even supported in this project!

    This makes me shake my head and think, "what the fuck?" This project is not only shooting itself in the foot by choosing a platform not fully supported by the OS, but is also screwing over the real meat of Darwin's userbase: PowerPC owners. This move is akin to opening a car garage (in America) whose mechanics are all experienced in servicing American cars, and then changing policy months later, stating that the garage will only work on foreign models.

    Where's the fucking logic?

    Seriously, am I the only one who is wondering who the Hell is in charge at that project? Kool-Aid Man? This move makes so little sense I can't tell if the people at GNU-Darwin are really that stupid, or if I am waking up in alternate realities every damn morning. I almost kind of hope for the latter.

    This is the GPL in action, Mac faithful. Get down and kiss Apple's butt for choosing the BSD license.

    1. Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Well, if you want to rely on a company that continually shafts you then I guess you could kiss their butt. Personally I think they're stupid as hell for not releasing OS X on Intel, and stupid before that for not allowing PowerPC clones. Where the hell do you think Microsoft made it's money? On making PC's???

    2. Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      You just replied to one of Trollaxor's old trolls.

      Don't you feel smart?

    3. Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by falcon5768 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      And to be totally truthfull a) Apple is a hardware company NOT a software one. They have been getting more and more into the software biz these days, but they have always been a hardware company that makes the OS for their systems, much like higher end server companies make tailor or even make OS's for their boxes. b) There where Power PC clones, Infact my first mac wass a powerbase 180 made by PowerComputing which was one of the best ones out there, but at the time it killed Apples sales and put them even more in the red than before., plus while the quality off some was great, mush better than Apples (best feature of mine, ability to use serial AND PS/2 mice and keyboards and Apple and PC VGA conectivity without using an adapter), some where horror shows on line with most second rate PC manufacturers and really brought down the macintosh's quality.

      Job's not being stupid and needing to fix all the red left from before, killed the clones that sucked and bought out the ones that where great so he could have those people on staff for him (which is why Apple has all the tech support documents for Power Computing still on their servers in support). It was that along with killing the projects sucking away money without showing anything for it (newton, which I still love and still use my eMate, and the old Apple server department, the ones that used IBM Unix in them) and the releace of the G3/iMac that saved the company and allowed him to do the big change, which was recoding the old NeXt OS, what we now know as OSX.

      --

      "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."

    4. Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How come dyslexics always write these long articles no one can understand?

    5. Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by phatsharpie · · Score: 1

      > Where the hell do you think Microsoft made it's money? On making PC's???

      By screwing over all of its business partners (IBM, Sybase, etc.) and abusing its monopoly.

    6. Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      YHBT HAND Douchebag

      I'd like to thank Trollaxor for making this possible. Everyone else can lick my nuts.

    7. Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are? by falcon5768 · · Score: 1

      wh we are just speaking to the trolls, we can be happy in knowing we have a knowlage of the computer industry the 13 year olds lack (sorry to any 13 year olds who are nice and considerate of posters on /.)

      --

      "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."

  4. WARNING!!! GOATSE LINKS IN STORY!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    It seems Trollaxor and Apple are in cahoots! Oh, the humanity![humanity.com]



    ....

  5. OSX on x86? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I can install this and use OSX on my x86 machine?

    1. Re:OSX on x86? by TRoLLaXoR · · Score: -1, Informative

      No, just Darwin. That means the kernel and all of the userland stuff, but no Cocoa, Carbon, QuickTime, Aqua, etc. What you get is a BSD UNIX, not Mac OS X.

    2. Re:OSX on x86? by TeknoTurd · · Score: 0

      no, if it were only that easy...

      --
      Erin Go Bragh!
  6. Troll-in-one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    All the *BSD is dying posts are contained in this one post. If you have mod points, please mod this up so that everybody will know that *BSD is dying! No need to post your own, as it will only be redundant!

    Oh, and if I've missed any, please add your troll as a reply and I'll include it in the next Troll-in-one.

    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

    The *BSD Wailing Song

    What's left for me to see
    In my ship I sailed so far
    What can the answer be
    Don't know what the questions are.
    And after all I've done
    Still I cannot feel the sun
    Tell me save me
    In the end our lost souls must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low.
    Who knows what's really true
    They say the end is so near
    Why are we all so cruel
    We just fill ourselves with fear.
    And heaven and hell will turn
    All that we love shall burn
    Hear me trust me
    In the end our lost sould must repent.
    I must know it is for certain
    Can it be the final curtain
    As long as the wind will blow
    I'll be searching high and low
    Final curtain
    Final curtain


    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

    • flask of ripe urine
      pressed to bsd lips
      bsd drink up

    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

    I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you BSD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this BSD box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

    In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

    I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various BSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a BSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the BSD machines faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that BSD is a "superior" machine.

    BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.


    _*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_

    It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying. Almost everyone knows that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell a

  7. What is Apple doing? by ziggyboy · · Score: 0

    What does Darwin hope to accomplish? It also seems that the development for Darwin is seperate for OpenDarwin. Are there any open source developers for Darwin? What about the OpenDarwin people, does Apple let them contribute to Darwin development (the one bundled with OS X)?

    Doesn't seem like it. Apple released the source AFTER 7.0 was finished. Which means the open source community wasn't in on its final development. Why would dedicated open source programmers of systems like Linux or *BSD contribute to this semi-open source system????

    And here's an interesting line from the OpenDarwin x86 release notes. I wonder why anyone would bother to develop Darwin for Intel machines.

    Known Issues
    ============

    * IDE drives may not work on x86. Try it, if it doesn't work, it's a known problem.

    Haha.

  8. Problems. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    After my third and final attempt with QNX, I felt I had to write in hopes of finding others who have had similar experiences. Hopefully someone can tell me what's wrong here. QNX has left me with a very sour taste in my mouth.

    The first system I tried to install QNX on was an old 100MHz Pentium with 32 megs of RAM. This was back in the Fall of 2000. Now, since QNX was supposed to be "tiny" and run on things like watches and hospital equipment, I was expecting it to breathe new life into my old Pentium. WRONG. The hard drive practically ate itself to death every time I launched a new app, and the RAM was almost always at full use. I mean what the Hell. But I gave it another try when Patch A came out. And Patch B, which killed networking entirely. I had given up and didn't want to touch Patch C when 6.1 came out.

    QNX 6.1 was a lot nicer than 6.0, but it was still a resource hog. RAM allocation was no better and processor usage was actually up. I decided I might as well upgrade the system with a new motherboard and a 500MHz Pentium II, but to my chagrin the five-fold increase in speed (not to mention MMX!) did little to boost the sagging performance. Willing to do anything to clear up this performance black hole, I installed Patch A to 6.1 the minute it was available. I noticed a slight increase in screen redraws but nothing more.

    To this day, even with the new 6.2 on a 2GHz Pentium 4, the QNX performance mystery boggles my mind. Either QNX doesn't really meet the defintion of a "real-time" OS, or we need to consider changing what "real-time" means. I wouldn't want my insulin drip running QNX in the middle of a surgery. I might die while it's paging in from /swap, and that's just unacceptable.

  9. You think you've got problems? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Hi, I've been using QNX for the last few weeks on my 1 GHz Penium III system, and I'm quite baffled by the performance or lack thereof that I've been seeing.

    I downloaded the QNX 6.2.1 ISO, burnt a CD, and installed onto my hard drive. This was after erasing an old Windows 2000/Linux dual-boot install. Things went smoothly, and I was easily able to connect to the Internet for updates to various packages. I was really impressed at this point.

    After a couple days of playing with it, however, I was boggled at how much like Windows the system acted. Here I was with a 1 GHz processor (the minimum required is 600 MHz) and 1 gigabyte of RAM and Photon, the GUI, was lagging. If I have a few programs open and an MP3 playing in the background, I can watch widgets redraw. Tweaking some options helped a little, but this is not in line with what I have read about QNX performance.

    Isn't this supposed to be a hard realtime operating system that runs on medical devices meant to save peoples' lives? How is it that it runs on 33 MHz processors with 128k of RAM in an IV drip yet skips MP3s on a system 100x beefier in every way imagineable? Do they release a different version for free that doesn't try for realtime performance or what?

    After less than a full month I've grown dissatisfied with something I'd hoped I could replace my Windows and Linux installs with for leisure and hobbyist purposes. My main system is a dual 3 GHz Pentium4 box with 4 gigs of RAM, but that's a DV workstation and I can't use it just to see how QNX scales with more robust hardware and a dual processor configuration. Something tells me it might not, though.

    Can anyone offer me any insights? I realize that this is a free operating system and that I have little room to bitch, but I want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing before I discount QNX altogether and go back to Windows or Linux, which while performing slugglishly are more familiar to me.

    Thank you.