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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."

10 of 55 comments (clear)

  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: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.

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  3. 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.

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

    It was delicious.

    -fred

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  5. 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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  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: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.