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Darwin 8.0.1 Available

Posted by timothy on from the keeps-evolving dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Apple's finally released binary versions of Darwin 8.0.1 for both PowerPC and x86 (Apple ID required to download from Apple mirrors). ISO (for x86) and CDR (for PowerPC) images are available for download. This comes a few weeks after Apple posted source code for Darwin 8, which you can get from here."

55 comments

  1. Finally! by poopdeville · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I can afford Tiger!

    Oh, wait....

    Seriously, does anyone know if it would be difficult to swap out the Darwin component of Panther with Darwin 8?

    --
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    1. Re:Finally! by ColMustard · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Possible? Perhaps. Many wild things are possible.

      I doubt it is worth the amount of fudging it would take to get everything to work normally.

      --
      Moof.
    2. Re:Finally! by hunterx11 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That depends on how you define difficult. You might be able to do it and be lucky enough to get it to boot. But I'm sure that dozens of things would be obviously broken, and dozens more would be broken that you wouldn't notice.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
    3. Re:Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Completely impossible. There were kernel API changes between Panther and Tiger that would leave you without neat things like a graphics display.

  2. Intel? by sootman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I tried Darwin on Intel earlier this year on a 1 GHz Athlon and was amazed at how slow it was. Like, typing 'ls /' gave output at a rate of a couple lines per second. I'm not exaggerating, it was like what you get when you run 'ls' against a floppy. What kind of experience have others had? Has anyone installed Darwin on Intel and wound up with a usable box? It's entirely possible something went wrong for me, or I did something wrong myself, but I want to see what it's been like for others before I go around saying 'Darwin on Intel is slow.'

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    1. Re:Intel? by avalys · · Score: 1

      A friend of mine tried it about a year ago, and while I don't remember his exact comments, I don't remember him saying anything about slowness.

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      This space intentionally left blank.
    2. Re:Intel? by corrosive_nf · · Score: 0

      the hardware it supports is very very very limited, last time i checked they only claimed to support the 440bx chipset and some similar older hardware

    3. Re:Intel? by HoldmyCauls · · Score: 1

      I downloaded OpenDarwin 7.2.1 earlier this year and tried it on two iMacs and a 700MHz Duron with 382MB of RAM -- I think the latter, or the CD drive speed, might have made the difference. I have not installed and *used* Darwin on any machine as yet (no boot loader is installed by default), though I plan to when I get another hard drive for another mac.

      --
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    4. Re:Intel? by MyDixieWrecked · · Score: 1

      one of my friends installed Darwin a couple years ago (version 6, maybe?) back when it was first released for x86 and his main complaint was that it didn't work like linux. Also, iirc, he had some issues compiling programs, but he didn't say anything about it being slow.

      i had it installed on a 450mhz G3 as a headless server before I decided I wanted to use an external firewire drive and couldn't figure out how to mount it, so I switched to Jaguar (not server).

      when it was on the G3, it ran great.

      --



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    5. Re:Intel? by Naikrovek · · Score: 1

      The kernel was built with SSE (intel-only) optimizations.

    6. Re:Intel? by lpontiac · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not that Darwin on x86 is a speed demon, but I think you'll find the slow 'ls /' is actually just the framebuffer driver.

    7. Re:Intel? by nacturation · · Score: 1

      I tried Darwin on Intel earlier this year on a 1 GHz Athlon and was amazed at how slow it was. Like, typing 'ls /' gave output at a rate of a couple lines per second. I'm not exaggerating, it was like what you get when you run 'ls' against a floppy. What kind of experience have others had?

      Well, it took me 17 minutes to copy a 40MB file. 17 minutes!!! Netcraft even confirms it! ;-)

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    8. Re:Intel? by tonsofpcs · · Score: 1

      17 Minutes??!? Only 17 minutes to copy an entire Hard Disk Drive's data!!!! The speed! I need to get a copy for my 80286 Compaq Portable III!!! </CRAZYTHOUGHTS>

      --
      Video Production Support
  3. WTF are apple up to? by Saven+Marek · · Score: 2, Funny

    What is this? this is ridiculous. My current up to date tiger Mac is only on darwin 8.0.0 and now they are giving away free 8.0.1? Wake up Apple some people are paying you to get products, not to pay for lagging behind. Fair enough if its the same version but I dont see any 8.0.1 in Tiger anywhere soon??? :angry:

    1. Re:WTF are apple up to? by keeleysam · · Score: 3, Informative

      You will get it with 10.4.1 due in less than a month. Its like this is in Debian unstable right now. When you get it it will be like testing.

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    2. Re:WTF are apple up to? by Saxphile · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why don't you see this as a indication of the imminent release of 10.4.1? ;)

      --
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    3. Re:WTF are apple up to? by Saven+Marek · · Score: 1

      Well I think it should be the other way around. paying members should get the update first and then leave it to be downloaded later. Or maybe on the same day, but not put people who pay for an operating system on the backburner when free things go first.,

    4. Re:WTF are apple up to? by kitzilla · · Score: 1
      You're drinking too much coffee. ;-)

      I'm sure 10.4.1 is a week or two out. Unlike today's Darwin release, it will have the benefit of wider testing.

      No "lagging" here. Go play with your widgets for a while and enjoy your new OS. The next point release will be available when Apple thinks it's ready for production machines.

      --
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    5. Re:WTF are apple up to? by argent · · Score: 1

      8.0.1 is not 10.4.1

      It may include some or most of the *kernel* changes in 10.4.1, but you're not missing out on anything except a chance to do some extra beta-testing to help the "paying customers" get a better product.

    6. Re:WTF are apple up to? by mgaiman · · Score: 2, Informative

      I would assume that Darwin 8.0.1 is just a fix for Darwin itself. Darwin 8.1.x will correspond to MacOS X 10.4.1. (Just as Darwin 7.9 corresponded to MacOSX 103.9.)

    7. Re:WTF are apple up to? by dr.badass · · Score: 1

      What is this? this is ridiculous. My current up to date tiger Mac is only on darwin 8.0.0 and now they are giving away free 8.0.1? Wake up Apple some people are paying you to get products, not to pay for lagging behind.

      You didn't pay for Darwin 8.0.0 -- you paid for all the stuff built on top of it. I sincerely doubt there's anything in this release that you're missing out on.

      I recommend calming the fuck down.

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    8. Re:WTF are apple up to? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you heard of a development model known as "open source"? (I know, it's probably not mentioned in the error-filled junior high science textbook that you treat as your Bible.) That's where a software developer releases software to the public free of charge and lets them play with it, check it for bugs, etc. It serves as a kind of "gamma testing" to ensure that the official final releases (such as those Apple gives to its paying customers) are sound and stable. The folks at Apple are smart enough to understand that their customers would rather get their software fully tested rather than shrieking like attention-starved twelve-year-olds (such as you) that they want it now!.

    9. Re:WTF are apple up to? by tverbeek · · Score: 1
      You're drinking too much coffee. ;-)

      He's not drinking coffee. That's a jug of methanol he's taking hits from.

      --
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    10. Re:WTF are apple up to? by cremes · · Score: 1

      Darwin 8.0.1 is Darwin 8.0.0 with some/most of the Carbon/Cocoa dependencies stripped out. Apple has to make some modifications to Darwin to get it to compile and boot without all the "other" libraries.

      When 10.4.1 is released, it will ship with Darwin 8.1.0. When they do a Darwin only release, you'll then see Darwin 8.1.1, etc.

      Nothing to see here....

    11. Re:WTF are apple up to? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're an idiot, plain and simple.

      So, by your reasoning, Fedora Core should always lag behind Red Hat's enterprise packages by a couple of revisions?

  4. Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Something that always frustrates me about /. is that this website will spend no effort to actually describe what it is reporting. I'm honestly confused. How does Darwin differ from Tiger and why the hell should I care? (I own a mac laptop and g5 desktop with X11 and other apps, although I'm not an IT person)

    1. Re:Huh? by argent · · Score: 4, Informative

      How does Darwin differ from Tiger and why the hell should I care?

      Darwin is the UNIX core of OS X, without any of the GUI or applications.

    2. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then why don't you, oh I don't know, read the damn website?

      If you do and you still can't understand the difference, then you almost certainly don't need it.

      Since this is slashdot and I know you're not actually going to spend any time doing any reading, I'll add a quick explanation. Darwin is the unix-like portion of OSX - the foundation of the system that the GUI runs on top of. It is (mostly?) open-sourced, and based on BSD code.

    3. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
      I'm honestly confused. How does Darwin differ from Tiger and why the hell should I care?

      Well this is Darwin 8.0.1, and your "tiger" Mac is only running 8.0. So you should go download the new Darwin (it's a free download) and install it on both your Macs. Then you'll have the latest and greatest. I suggest a Clean Install just to make sure everything is fresh.

  5. Innocent Question by kenthorvath · · Score: 1

    What benefits are there to running Darwin on x86 as opposed to Linux or any other BSD?

    1. Re:Innocent Question by argent · · Score: 2, Funny

      What benefits are there to running Darwin on x86 as opposed to Linux or any other BSD?

      Chicks dig scars.

    2. Re:Innocent Question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      None at all. The only reason Darwin is available is because Apple likes the open-source model for development of the lowest, least visible, least innovative parts of its OS.

    3. Re:Innocent Question by Temporal · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well, it is a microkernel, if you're into that. It has kqueue() and AIO, which make it better than Linux (although Linux did finally get around to adding full AIO a couple months ago; slowpokes), though FreeBSD obviously has had both of those for a long time. Yeah, I guess it's basically a microkernel FreeBSD. You might---- er, excuse me, but there seems to be an angry mob of Linux users outside my door.

    4. Re:Innocent Question by argent · · Score: 1

      Apple likes the open-source model for development of the lowest, least visible, least innovative parts of its OS

      The kernel might just be the old dinosaurian hindbrain, but remember what Mac OS was like when Apple was trying to make do without one.

    5. Re:Innocent Question by MrHanky · · Score: 2, Informative

      I tried Darwin (OpenDarwin) on PPC, and couldn't find any benefits to it. OS X is really all about the proprietary stuff Apple put on top. Darwin doesn't even support the compressed disk image files (.dmg) that most software is distributed with (nor does it support Stuffit .sit files, which is the other important archive format for software for Apples -- but you can download that separately as a .dmg file). You can install some software from DarwinPorts, but it's severely broken. I'd expect Fink to work, if you compile it from source (otherwise, it's distributed as a .dmg file...), but you'll obviously not get any binaries for x86.

      If you like compiling everything by hand, I guess it's OK, if a little crude, slow and non-standard. But if you're going to use your computer, I see no benefits of Darwin, unless the alternative is MS-DOS.

    6. Re:Innocent Question by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      It also has, I believe, proper HFS+ support. I don't know how valuable this is to you, but an easily searchable (lookup the searchfs system call), metadata-aware FS seems like a strong selling point to me. Not to mention a few nice tweaks like launchd.

      --
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    7. Re:Innocent Question by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1
      Darwin doesn't even support the compressed disk image files (.dmg) that most software is distributed

      I've not used Darwin, but did you look for the hdiutil utility? It is used to manipulate disk images from the terminal in OS X.

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    8. Re:Innocent Question by MrHanky · · Score: 1

      I know (it took me a fair time to find out when I tested Darwin), but that's the utility that is missing -- probably because it depends on other proprietary software.

  6. Intel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Please don't refer to the x86 platform as "Intel."

    Jesus, man, you're an AMD user.

  7. Huh. by FredFnord · · Score: 0, Troll

    Every community makes assumptions about what its members know. Either you learn those things, or you are not part of the community. The community of Slashdot assumes that one of the following two things is true:

    1 - You have a basic idea what Darwin is.

    and/or

    2 - You couldn't care less about Macs.

    If neither of those is true, you are not currently part of Slashdot's target audience. Learn, deal, or leave.

    -fred

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  8. I 8 MY IPOD by FredFnord · · Score: 4, Funny

    It was delicious.

    -fred

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  9. darwin (but not os x) users? by sleepypants · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm curious about the number of people who run Darwin (but not OS x) on Apple hardware. I have Darwin 8.0 already as part of OS X and see no good reason to strip off the GUI and go "Darwin only". On x86, the hardware compatibility list seems to be woefully short. Is releasing Darwin just a feel-good thing for Apple, to show support for the open-source world? I can't believe it's just PR, yet I can't see the user base being there either. The whole appeal of Macs (at least for me) is to get the nice GUI plus the UNIX underpinning rather than Yet Another UNIX-like distribution in Darwin.

    --
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    1. Re:darwin (but not os x) users? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Is releasing Darwin just a feel-good thing for Apple, to show support for the open-source world?

      Kind of. When you consider that with BSD, they don't have to release jack -- it's a pretty nice thing for them to be doing.

      What do they get out of it? Free labor, to some degree. People do actually hack darwin for fun, and Apple gets to incorporate that work into Mac OS X, according the Darwin's license.

      There *isn't* much reason to downgrade from Mac OS X to Darwin-only. But that doesn't mean people won't run it where they can. It's just another verson of BSD, actively hacked-on, and tailored for PPC hardware. If that excites you, go for it, if not, meh -- there's always FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, a million versions of Linux, etc, etc.

      ASOTV can probably knows better. Ask him next time you his his posts.

    2. Re:darwin (but not os x) users? by mjsottile77 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I haven't tried it myself, but there are times that it seems a binary compatible UNIX would be nice as an alternative to OSX. Quite often I find myself running plain-old C apps that perform much better and much more consistently if I boot OSX into console mode to disable the GUI infrastructure. It seems a pure darwin compute slave might be slightly more transparent to use than recompiling my code to run on *BSD or an OSX box setup to boot console only. Of course, this is purely speculation - I haven't tried it myself. Anyoe out there tried this?

    3. Re:darwin (but not os x) users? by gidds · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Darwin's usefulness spreads far wider than just those who use it directly.

      For example, as a Mac OS X user, when I discovered a problem in the MSDOS-format volume handling (specifically, a minor incompatibility with CF cards that had been used on EPOC/Symbian OS), I was able to use the Darwin source to fix it myself. I downloaded and searched the relevant source code, instrumented/recompiled/ran a few user-land programs, found the problem, fixed and tested it, and then submitted it to Apple, who (after a nice chat with one of their engineers) put it into Darwin 7 and Mac OS X 10.3. It was hardly a major change, just 3 or 4 lines IIRC, but I'd not have been able to do it without Darwin's source code.

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    4. Re:darwin (but not os x) users? by jwthompson2 · · Score: 1

      I can see a use for running Darwin only on Mac hardware in a server farm environment where the GUI gets in the way although Apple has done a good job to only have stuff eating processor time when it is actually doing something. If I were going to build a hosting platform on Apple hardware but would be using SSH and other such administration systems I would dump OS X and go for Darwin on its own just to reduce clutter and free up some resources.

      --
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    5. Re:darwin (but not os x) users? by argent · · Score: 1

      Yeh, for a long time I was able to get the same kind of value from the FreeBSD source tree when I was trying to deal with problems in early versions of Tru64 (Digital UNIX, OSF/1) as a network admin. It's not that you need this stuff that often, but when you need it it makes a BIG difference.

  10. Installed Darwin...now what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I know. I'm a n00b, but I installed Darwin, got a prompt, ftp'd to my website, surfed around an account with ssh, etc. But I have to admit I didn't know much about setting up a Darwin/*nix system. I logged in as root and sat there with my thumbs in my ear. I have to admit that I would rather go out and buy a Mac Mini to be a web server for my setup than clunk around in Darwin.

    I know my way around the shell, but there are plenty of holes in my admin knowledge that I could use some help filling. Are there websites/books out there that you could recommend I check out? Something that helps a n00b get Darwin up and running and useful? App suggestions? Things like that.

    Please be gentle. heh

    1. Re:Installed Darwin...now what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Installed Darwin...now what?

      Beats me too. You can open up a terminal and get all that Unix'y goodness in OS X and still have all that OS X eye candy. So who needs Darwin?

  11. finally slashdot catches up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Finally it seems that slashdot has posted an article. The Darwin 8.0.1 CD was released the same day as Tiger. =)

  12. CVSup? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is the something I can CVSup? Where are the instructions?

  13. Yeah, don't buy Tiger ;) by core · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    My sales have dipped a bit starting exactly when people forked out $150 for Tiger (yes, it's worth that much, I know :P) and are playing with the numerous freebies with no money left to buy additional software this month :) (well, it's coming back up now)

    Cartoon mini golf game for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/