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Darwin 8.0.1 Available
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."
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.
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
Please don't refer to the x86 platform as "Intel."
Jesus, man, you're an AMD user.
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.
Not that Darwin on x86 is a speed demon, but I think you'll find the slow 'ls /' is actually just the framebuffer driver.
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.)
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.
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.