Darwin, Fink Updates
BSDForums writes "The Darwin team is pleased to announce the availability of the Darwin 7.0.1 Installer CD. This is a single Installer CD that will boot and install Darwin on Macintosh computers supported by Mac OS X 10.3, as well as certain x86-based personal computers. The version of Darwin installed by this CD corresponds to the open source core of Mac OS X 10.3. Check out the release notes for more information."
dmalloc writes "The Fink team has announced that their binary distribution versioned 0.6.2 is ready for use now. It is a bug-fix release to alleviate issues that came up in 0.6.1. Along with the bug fixes, it introduces an enhanced package manager which is now capable of using the finkmirrors.net-supplied rsync and distfiles mirrors."
OpenDarwin.org maintains a database of x86 hardware that has been successfully used with Darwin.
http://opendarwin.org/hardware/
Have you used a normal BSD installation? Think console/shell at startup (nice full-screen framebuffer-based one, though, at least on PPC), and XWindows for your choice of desktop environments.
Of course, you've got effectively the NeXTStep/OpenStep/OS X system environment, which means Frameworks, NetInfo, etc., are all in there, along with a Mach-based kernel-land environment, which is fairly opaque at the user level.
Try installing the X11 SDK from the Panther Xcode CD. I installed the X11 SDK and Fink 0.6.2 (in that order) and I haven't been asked by Fink to install XFree86.
JP
There is a FAQ about this, I don't know if you tried it, or if it applies to 0.6.2, but it worked for me a couple weeks ago.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that Darwin is kind of like the thing running "under" Jaguar or Panther.
:-) ).
Roughly, Darwin is the underlying part of the operating system; the rest of Jaguar/Panther is mostly user interface stuff. This is what Apple charges money for---Darwin they give away, and the user interface part is $129 (per year
So you wouldn't install Darwin if you already have Jag or Panther. Only if you have another computer that you want to set up with a free OS (and you don't mind installing user interface stuff like X windows), or maybe if you want to set up a "dual boot" thing on a single computer. I could imagine this latter setup being useful for testing, or for servers (normally don't need GUI, but every now and then reboot into GUI?).
Presumably every update that's made to Darwin is also released for Jaguar/Panther via Software Update. At least, I hope so. (Insert here standard comment about Apple being taken seriously in Enterprise.)
zach