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Dumping Aqua On Mac OS X For X11?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-change-in-UI dept.

Sagefire asks: "Aqua is a beautiful interface but it can be incredibly resource intensive (especially for older/low-end machines). And, though the open source community has made great strides in reverse engineering proprietary drivers from Mac OS X, I would love to be able to simply keep using the drivers that came with it, for now. Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"

8 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. I tried that by clang_jangle · · Score: 5, Informative

    But even without running Aqua OS X is extremely resource-hungry. Test it yourself by logging in as username ">console" (without the quotes) for a command prompt and you'll see what I mean. Wish I had better news...

    --
    Caveat Utilitor
    1. Re:I tried that by the_humeister · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not quite. The best way to test this is if you enter the command-line directly by either going into single-user mode or editing the /etc/ttys since these methods don't load Aqua at all. If you use the >console method, I don't think the system unloads Aqua from memory.

  2. Re:Less RAM. by maynard · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bullshit.

    I remember running a full 'nix with X11 and TWM with 4mb of RAM on a Sun 3/80. If you wanted color, a Sun 3/60 could handle it with 8mb; 16mb would give you a "screaming" 4 mips pizza box. When the Sun 3/80s and Sparc 1's came out, a 32mb system with a cg24 sbus card could get you full 24bit color with a megapixel display. And it had plenty of RAM to do real work.

    Compare that with a 128mb or 256mb G3 CRT iMac and you've got way more than enough ram and CPU horsepower to run X11 with plenty of useful apps. Christ, I ran X11 on a 486 with 8mb of RAM and a 512kb XVGA card back in 1994 and it worked just fine. (And BTW: NeXTStep on an old cube ran DPS just great in 16mb of RAM too. It's not DPDF that's the hog - it's Aqua).

  3. I've been bypassing Aqua for ages... by Channard · · Score: 5, Funny

    .. ever since I heard 'Barbie Girl' in fact.

  4. It's possible by the_humeister · · Score: 5, Informative

    But you're better off using something else (eg some Linux variant, BSD, etc.)

    However, if you really want to try, do the following:

    1) open /etc/ttys. The first two lines that begin with "console" has one which is commented out. Uncomment that one and comment out the second one. Now the next time you reboot, you'll enter the console directly

    2) Install XDarwin, which can be started from the command-line as opposed to the X that Apple provides which can only be started alongside Aqua.

    Have fun, but it's not really that interesting.

  5. Yes, it's possible by baryon351 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"

    Yes, it's possible. At least, it was a few years ago, when I first installed KDE via fink then logged in at the login prompt as user ">console" (with no password) and performed a startx. I didn't use it for a terribly long time as a KDE-only box, and it was more an experiment to see what was possible - but it worked just like any other KDE setup. I didn't use Apple's own X11, but had XDarwin installed instead.

    A note too - Aqua is only the default theme with OSX, and just describes the look of the OSX GUI. Quartz is the engine underneath that performance depends on. There was no noticeable difference in speed with XDarwin over Quartz, but perhaps that could be improved with more work on XDarwin.

  6. And so you bought a mac because? by coaxial · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why would you want to do this? Seriously. Why? You bought a mac, but you want to remove all the mac specific stuff from it. Why didn't you save you're money and just by a PC and install linux on it. If you're not using the mac apps, (and let's be honest, Darwin doesn't count. It's just another BSD clone, which is essentially just another unix.) then you bought the hardware to look cool. If you absolutely have to look cool, but not run any of the macosx apps, then just dual boot.

    The whole point of a unix guy owning a mac is that it's unix in all the way he wants (command line, symlinks, standard unix tools) and none of the ways he doesn't (insmod, recompiliing kernels, fucking with wpasupplicant and buggy ass drivers). It Just Works(tm). You seem bent on ignoring THE advantage of the mac, and turning it into just another piece of commodity hardware, only at luxury prices. It's absolutely pointless.

  7. "Needless eye candy" indeed! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
    OS X did not support that machine's video card for any sort of acceleration, and there was no way to turn down the needless eye candy to a level that made the OS usable.

    Needless OS X eye candy?!

    I suppose you think Paris Hilton's diamond labia ring is needless, too. Well, I'm here to tell you that OS X and Paris Hilton need their bling!