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OpenDarwin 7.2.1 Released

Posted by timothy on from the true-to-their-word dept.

Ed Waldmire writes "I am pleased to annouce to the /. community that the OpenDarwin community has released OpenDarwin 7.2.1. This release corresponds to Mac OS X 10.3.2 and includes many bugfixes and additions. Most notable are ncutil, YUM, and a tulip NIC driver."

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Darwin on x86 -- QUESTIONS by cremes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is no advantage to opendarwin on x86 over the others mentioned. It's maintained primarily to act as a way to validate that code is written correctly (by compiling for two different architectures and verifying it doesn't expose any bugs).

    OpenDarwin isn't intended to be very speedy and reliable on x86 hardware. We have FreeBSD for that.

    OpenDarwin isn't intended to support every x86 motherboard or weird peripheral. We have NetBSD for that.

    OpenDarwin isn't intended to be the most secure OS out there. We have OpenBSD for that.

    OpenDarwin isn't intended to form the center of a large and growing religious cult. We have Linux for that. :-)

    Use OpenDarwin if you want to check out the foundation upon which OSX is built. It has some very cool technologies that other OSs do not.

    For example, it replaces rc.* scripts (BSD) and run-levels (SysV) with SystemStarter. Second, the driver model was designed with OOP in mind and has been branded I/OKit. Third, instead of littering the filesystem with lots of "dot-files" it uses the SystemConfiguration framework to store configurations.

    Using OpenDarwin-x86 + GNUStep + WindowMaker (or AfterStep) gets you a machine that looks like OSX on x86.

    Take a look. You might like what you find.

    cr

  2. Re:Darwin on x86 -- QUESTIONS by Orick · · Score: 5, Informative


    The problem is that you just get the base OS, which isn't any better than say, FreeBSD, but not too much worse either, but you don't get the GUI, which after all is the difference (from FreeBSD, Linux, whatever) that you'd want from Apple in the first place.

    --
    Kirby Reviews

  3. Re:Can somebody test it under vmware3? by cremes · · Score: 4, Informative

    I haven't verified this myself, but I hear it hangs under vmware because opendarwin requires VESA 2.0 compliant video. Apparently vmware doesn't emulate VESA 2.0 and is not quite fully compliant which causes the framebuffer code to choke.

    I ran into a guy at WWDC who was planning to rewrite the framebuffer code to work with vmware. I've got his card around here somewhere...

    cr