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."

Comments

darwin (but not os x) users?

[sleepypants]

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.

Re:darwin (but not os x) users?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.