Nokia N900 Linux Smartphone Running OS X

Rovaani writes "There is a video floating around of a Nokia N900 smartphone running the full desktop Mac OS X 10.3. From the author, Tomi Nikkanen: 'I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone ever to run a full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). As you can see from the heavily edited video, it took almost 2 hours to reach the "About my Mac..." window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is.'"

Comments

Useless commentary

[saleenS281]

What's with the "uselessly slow" commentary. The guy did it just to prove it could be done, which is pretty cool. I don't think he ever made any assertion that it would be a usable OS alternative for the N900...

Re:Useless commentary

[TheRaven64]

OS X 10.3 was PowerPC-only. The N900 has an ARM CPU. The 'uselessly slow' commentary comes from the fact that it's running in an emulator (QEMU? I didn't RTFA), so it's not like the phone is running the OS, the phone is running the emulator and the emulator is running the OS. Remember the people running PowerPC OS X emulated on P3/P4 CPUs before the first Intel release? It's going to be even slower than that.

Re:Useless commentary

[larry bagina]

the article didn't mention specifics, but it's powered by a 600 mhz arm with 256 meg ram, 768 meg VM.

Re:Useless commentary

[marcansoft]

The emulator used is PearPC. I'm not sure if it does JIT/Dynamic Recompilation, but I seriously doubt it has an ARM backend, so chances are it's running in full software emulation mode, which is going to be ridiculously slow.

Re:Useless commentary

[uhoreg]

The "uselessly slow" commentary is straight from the blog of the guy who did it. http://www.tuug.fi/~toni/serendipity/index.php?/archives/13-Mac-OS-X-10.3-running-on-the-N900!.html

Re:Useless commentary

[Nursie]

It's not even an OS for the n900, it's on an emulator.

No lack of kudos for it, but it's not like it's native... I have heard of one dual booting Maemo and Android, which I thought was pretty cool.

Re:Useless commentary

[Cederic]

Whoa - where?

I want an Android VM for Maemo, hooked into the phone hardware. Then it's the best phone on the market bar none.

As it is, it's the best phone on the market except for the application support; I'm still hoping that comes good.

Re:Useless commentary

[Neil Hodges]

That's why you look it up elsewhere.

Re:Useless commentary

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you sure don't work much. "...I've been sitting here at my freelance gig.. Warcraft will not work...Safari is straining to keep up as I type this... "

Re:Useless commentary

[EvilNTUser]

The N900 has the best out-of-the-box application support*. Look under Menu/Application Manager to find Easy Debian ;)

*Technically correct. The best kind of correct.

Re:Useless commentary

[maestro371]

You're doing something very wrong. I use an iMac and a Macbook Pro (both far weaker than the machine you're using) and routinely copy around gigabytes of data without the types of delays you're talking about.

I just did a quick test with dd and copy:

imac:~ justin$ date
Mon Feb 1 11:46:09 PST 2010
imac:~ justin$ dd if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=2048k count=20
20+0 records in
20+0 records out
41943040 bytes transferred in 0.562810 secs (74524341 bytes/sec)
imac:~ justin$ date
Mon Feb 1 11:46:19 PST 2010
imac:~ justin$ sudo cp test /
Password:
imac:~ justin$ date
Mon Feb 1 11:46:39 PST 2010
imac:~ justin$ ls -lah /test
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 40M Feb 1 11:46 /test
imac:~ justin$

Even with pausing to think about what I was typing and to enter my sudo password, it took 30 seconds to create a 40MiB file and move it to another folder. Honestly, it was probably more like 10 seconds, considering that most of that time was me being slow and mis-typing.

Re:Useless commentary

[pushing-robot]

http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks

Old meme is old.

Re:Useless commentary

[maestro371]

Ah. My bad.

Re:Useless commentary

[Cederic]

Although I do like the screen and keyboard on the n900, it's not exactly a desktop replacement in that department.

It therefore benefits significantly from applications designed for the mobile form factor. Command line tools and general linux apps - good as they are - are not at their best in such a situation.

It's the difference between "I can do it" and "I want to do it". I want to have applications I want to use (but I'm too lazy to write them).

Obviously at a personal level it's all my own fault for being lazy. At a market level I think the n900 needs a lot more apps written for the platform, and ideally an Android VM providing access to the 20k apps written for that platform.

In the meantime I love the device for what it is; I just have a desire for it to be better.

Re:Useless commentary

[Nursie]

I would like to see android as a downloadable set of *stuff* for generic linux, allowing you to run android apps alongside X apps. it looks like Michael Frey has been working on it, though with mixed results.

As for dual boot I saw this page here and it looked interesting. I very much doubt it's a polished or finished thing that can access all the hardware properly, but it is at least booting.

Re:Useless commentary

[TheRaven64]

Is that a serious question? Of course we would!

Re:Useless commentary

[keeboo]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Mac Pro with two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors and 6GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

I'm no Mac fan at all, but there must be something seriously wrong with your Mac, or you forgot to tell us some "little detail".
Mac OS pre-X was rubbish, I remember that Linux ran faster in a Performa 6360 than its native OS.

But a Mac Pro with Mac OS X copying a file slower than 1MB/sec? I find it hard to believe. Even a 7MHz Amiga was faster than this.

Re:Useless commentary

[keeboo]

Nevermind... As someone pointed out here, it's an old meme.

Copy-paste trolls are even lower than the conventional ones.

Re:Useless commentary

[mrpacmanjel]

As it is, it's the best phone on the market except for the application support; I'm still hoping that comes good

Are you nuts?
Go to http://maemo.org/downloads/Maemo5/.
Presently there are 149 applications for the n900 and a few via the OVI store.

BTW:
There is an effort to port Android to the n900: http://gizmodo.com/5455495/watch-a-nokia-n900-dual+boot-maemo-and-android

If you want android then buy a google phone!!!!

You are border-line trolling!

Re:Useless commentary

[Cederic]

So 200 apps vs 20,000? Please..

Re:Useless commentary

[jonadab]

> What's with the "uselessly slow" commentary. The guy did
> it just to prove it could be done, which is pretty cool

You must be new here.

It was necessary to point out the slowness in order to forestall a whole lot of drooling, glossy-eyed posts about how obviously because of this OS X is going to completely take over the cellphone market; no, it isn't, Linux rules; yes, it is, Linux is a niche product; OS X will take over the Windows segment; no, Linux will take over that; et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam.

Pointing out that it's too slow to be practical does not imply that it isn't an interesting achievement from a technical standpoint. It just stops people from going over the top with enthusiastic excitement over the potential of this new technology to revolutionize the world.

Re:Useless commentary

[mrpacmanjel]

Considering the n900 was released only a couple of months ago that's pretty good going.

When the android phone was first released (year and a half ago?) it had only a handful (well under 100 apps) of applications available.

By your expectations the n900 should have over 20,000 applications "instantly"?

Re:Useless commentary

[Cederic]

If you read my other posts on this topic you'd see that I'm delighted with the phone, and realistic in my expectations of application support.

I have installed command line apps from Debian repositories. I have installed several of the apps available in the Maemo repositories (including dev and testing).

I also still hope that the device will be able to run Android apps _within Maemo_ as that will immediately give access to a significantly broader suite of apps designed for the mobile form factor.

Simple reality is that the n900 will never have as many purpose-written apps as Android phones, but as it's capable of running them (hardware; software will follow) it's not an either|or choice. I want both.

I don't think it's trolling to acknowledge that the n900 does not have particularly extensive app support yet, and especially when compared to the iPhone or to Android. I also don't think it'll ever match either, except as described above.

Maybe you disagree, but I am surprised by the ferocity of your disagreement.

Not useless

[Renegade Lisp]

Maybe uselessly slow, yes, but this is the kind of tinkering that any device should allow if it is to be called a computer.

There's a direct link to a free information society from these kinds of experiments -- something that is very much endangered by the current trend towards unmodifiable devices and appifization.

Re:Not useless

[Haxzaw]

Nobody cares about licensing restrictions.

Re:Not useless

[Verdatum]

It's not a computer unless you can use it in a car simile.

Re:Not useless

[tsa]

I think the Nokia N900 is the coolest smartphone out there at the moment, partly because it's so open. But even when you don't want to tinker with it, it blows the iPhone away in terms of multitasking, bluetooth, keyboard and lots of other things.

Re:Not useless

[Verdatum]

All true. But the touchscreen is fragile as hell. You really shouldn't mimic the open-faced iPhone design unless you've got a reinforced glass screen. Oh well. My protective case is being shipped, and I'll probably send in my phone (with the mysterious hole that appeared on the first day of ownership) to be fixed sooner or later.

Re:Not useless

[blackpig]

Well said sir!

Re:Not useless

[nacturation]

Fine then. Licensing restrictions can go and get fucked.

So what you're saying is that you'd like to violate a few licensing restrictions?

Re:Not useless

[Narcogen]

Maybe uselessly slow, yes, but this is the kind of tinkering that any device should allow if it is to be called a computer.

Why should the definition of a word be derived solely from the interpretation of a vocal minority? Most people don't use phones, or "mobile computers" or even their regular computers for tinkering. Most don't install alternate or substitute or multiple operating systems.

A computer is a means to an end for most people, not an object in itself. Whether the object is, in itself, capable of being tinkered with is irrelevant to most people who will never, ever tinker with it. Tinkerers are a small market, or else the Neo Freerunner would be the darling of the press instead of the iPhone.

Somewhat ironic

[Soulfarmer]

I find it somewhat ironic that iPhone's competitor can run Apple's OS and iPhone/iPad most probably will never be able to run Mac OS.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[TheRaven64]

It's running it in an emulator. Apple won't allow emulators in the store, but if you had a dev kit and ported QEMU to the iPhone it would run OS X too. It would, of course, be equally useless.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[LWATCDR]

Actually the iPhone does run OS/X just a different flavor of it.
I guess that one could port a VM to the iPhone or iPad if you had the dev kit for it or jail broke it.
I would say it is possible but not sanctioned.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Your definition of 'run' is being stretched a bit to find that irony.

Overrated? Really? Okay. Obviously somebody with a mod-point didn't understand what I was saying, so I will be clearer. It takes two hours to boot. To say you are 'running OSX on a Nokia phone' is not all that different from saying "I can brick my Nokia phone for two hours". At the end of the day, you're not doing anything productive with OSX on either platform. It is so crappy, in fact, that the iPhone OS's basis in OSX is actually a lot more meaningful and destroys the 'irony' of that statement.

Sorry to suck the fun out of the statement, but the use of the word 'run' is being stretched to make that irony seem meaningful.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps because the two have an entirely different userland, which tends to affect the arguement.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[fredmosby]

The iPhone and iPad run the multi-touch version of OSX. Calling it the 'iPhone OS' is poor marketing on Apple's part, but it really is full OSX with a different (better in terms of usability) interface.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[Arthur Grumbine]

It's running it in an emulator. Apple won't allow emulators in the store, but if you had a dev kit and ported QEMU to the iPhone it would run OS X too. It would, of course, be equally useless.

And with some sugar and water we can make lemonade - if we had some lemons...

Re:Somewhat ironic

[jbeaupre]

By your logic, my 8088 was running a version of Windows 7, just a different flavor of it.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[camperslo]

I find it somewhat ironic that iPhone's competitor can run Apple's OS and iPhone/iPad most probably will never be able to run Mac OS.

Perhaps someone (maybe Apple?) can provide a Remote Desktop Client app for the iPad. Besides being a roundabout way to get a "Finder" to browse the shareable iPad directories, one remotely access things on the desktop back home that would be most in need of more cheap bandwidth or CPU power. Administering a bittorrent client, doing some scheduling and video edit/export in Eye-TV, and setting up Handbrake for custom conversions to h.264 come to mind. Your desktop would help to provide some of the content for use on the iPad, and perhaps allow use of some other apps too.

I'm not sure if iPad apps can be written to be hardware aware like on Mac OS (example: adapting to whatever screen area is provided instead of being hard-coded).

I can't remember the name of the Mac OS 9 (or earlier??) 3rd party extension that allowed making a virtual screen at some size much bigger than the actual display, with the display being a portal that could be slid around simply by pushing the cursor against any edge. Of course pinch-zoom would be there too, for moving in and out and around on that remote desktop.

Looking like you're running desktop OS X on that iPad might sometimes be more practical than actually doing it.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[Urkki]

By your logic, my 8088 was running a version of Windows 7, just a different flavor of it.

Or to put it the other way, quadrillion core i753 will still be running a version of PC-DOS 1.0.

And it won't run smoothly.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[LWATCDR]

Not really. Both Macs and iPhones run the same Kernel even if they are for different ISAs. Kind of like how my Android phone, PC, and Router are all running Linux.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[UnknowingFool]

I find it somewhat ironic that iPhone's competitor can run Apple's OS and iPhone/iPad most probably will never be able to run Mac OS.

Based on your statement, you are assuming that the iPhone can't run Mac OS X. Apple has never said that it could not but rather they developed a special version of OS X to run on the mobile devices. Based on Apple's own documentation iPhone OS X is a subset of OS X. Also the poster was able to get Mac OS X to run, but admittedly it is very, very slow because it runs in an emulator. Granted it's a cool project but Apple has decided to go another direction with their iPhone OS and their customers don't want a slow OS for their phones.

Really, it's not different than getting a server flavor of an OS (Linux, Unix, Windows, OS X) to run on a generic desktop PC. You can get it to work, but that doesn't mean it will work well all the time.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[maxume]

That's not entirely fair, the NT kernel was never built for anything less than a 32 bit processor.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[david_thornley]

Specifically, get a dev kit and port QEMU. Then fork over your $100 for the dev program (yes, you can do it in that order), and load the whole thing onto your iPhone. Note that your phone cost more than $100, so the developer program membership isn't the biggest cost.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

No, because the iphone actually runs the Darwin kernel, just like OSX. Your 8088 was not running the NT Kernel.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[farble1670]

OSX is darwin + aqua. iphone OS is darwin + the iphone GUI.

iphone OS != OSX.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

Re:Somewhat ironic

[fredmosby]

That's really a semantic argument that distracts from the point I was trying to make. People seem to think the iPhone OS is a stripped down version of OSX. It isn't. It's the Mac OS with an interface optimized for a multi touch display rather than a keyboard and mouse. People complain that the iPad doesn't run full OSX. Why would it when it's a multi-touch device?

Re:Somewhat ironic

[TheRaven64]

No, the two have a userland that is 90% the same. A few frameworks are not shipped with the iPhone (Autozone, Carbon, AppKit), and one is only shipped with the iPhone (UIKit), but the XNU kernel, the Darwin userland, the Quartz windowserver, the CoreGraphics and CoreAnimation librarys for controlling the window server, the FreeBSD-derived libc, the Apple Objective-C runtime, the Foundation framework, and most of the other C and Objective-C frameworks, are all present on both.

Re:Somewhat ironic

[TheRaven64]

Aqua is the name of the theme. The display server is called Quartz, and it is present on both. The low-level API for using it is called CoreGraphics and it is present on both. The API for dynamic effects using it is called CoreAnimation, and it is present on both.

Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why Mac OS X should run poorly on modern cell phones. After all, these phones now offer more resources than the high-end workstations that NeXTSTEP ran on in the late 1980s and early 1990s. NeXTSTEP was really snappy on that hardware.

And not all that much has changed between NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. Anyone who used NeXTSTEP back in the day knows how remarkably little has changed since Apple took it over.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the processor architecture is also being emulated (notice the "pearpc" bit at the top of the screen).

OsX native to the Arm architecture would probably be an order of magnitude or more faster.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[oronet commander]

OsX native to the Arm architecture would probably be an order of magnitude or more faster Just wonder, only 12 minutes to "About this Mac"... sweet!

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Bert64]

It is an order of magnitude faster, my iphone seems to run it perfectly well.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[mister_playboy]

Your iPhone doesn't run OS X.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

Yes it does.

Essentially, the iPhone runs a scaled down version of MacOS X optimized for a handheld device -- although Steve Jobs is insistent that it runs "real OS X" (Specifically, crashlogs indicate that the original iPhone ran "OS X 1.0" build number 1A543a.) -- but no iPhone models can run MacOS X applications regardless. On March 17, 2009, upon unveiling a developer's preview of the third version of the operating system, Apple started referring to it as the "iPhone OS".

http://www.everyipod.com/iphone-faq/iphone-runs-os-x-not-macos-x-cannot-run-macos-x-applications-skype-or-ipod-games.html

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[nine-times]

It's not the full desktop version, but it's basically the same codebase, stripped down to what they wanted for the iPhone, recompiled for a different CPU, and with a UI designed for a small touchscreen.

I guess it depends on where you draw the line on what's the "same operating system". How many modifications can I make to FreeBSD before you say it's not FreeBSD anymore? I don't know.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[mister_playboy]

I don't really care about Steve Job's word games. The functionality isn't even close to the same and they refer to it as iPhone OS, not OS X, in recognition of that.

Car analogy: The Chevy Corvette and the Chevy Chevette both had "vette" in their names, but they are hardy the same kind of car.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[EvilNTUser]

I agree. As long as the phone doesn't do almost anything that desktop OSX could provide, it doesn't matter one iota whether the iPhone runs on XNU, Linux or EKA2. Any claims otherwise are just marketing BS.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

So then those Linksys routers that run Linux really don't because the functionality isn't the same. Cool.

The software is a modified form of OS X that they have branded iPhone OS.

It has webkit, Safari, quicktime, multihthreading, multitasking, the BSD core bits etc etc. It just has a different UI. Just because certain features aren't accessible in the default configuration as suppled by Apple doesn't change what it is.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[maxume]

Man, they are both still Chevys.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[EvilNTUser]

Can you treat your router as if it were running a lightweight Linux? Yes. (I'm assuming you can ssh to them, right? I don't have one.)
Can you treat your iPhone as if it were running a lightweight OSX? No.

Saying "it just has a different UI" is being very generous, when absolutely nothing about the functionality is the same. The iPhone apps might as well run on top of BeOS. It's nice for Apple that they can reuse the system code, but nothing any user would understand as OSX is running on an iPhone.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Delkster]

So then those Linksys routers that run Linux really don't because the functionality isn't the same.

Yes, they do, but they don't run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Putting kernel vs. OS nitpicking aside, Linux is a more generic term referring to any OS using the same low-level OS components as a basis. OS X, on the other hand, is associated with the entire desktop.

Sure, it's quite possible that the iPhone OS has been built on top of Darwin. That's a better comparison to routers running Linux. But no, it doesn't run OS X in any meaningful sense.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Urkki]

So then those Linksys routers that run Linux really don't because the functionality isn't the same. Cool.

Uh... What Linux OS functionality is missing from the Linksys routers you mention?

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[adolf]

I can SSH into my cheap Linksys router. It's got all of the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only a router.)

I can SSH into my iPod Touch (I don't have an iPhone). It's also got all the textmode goodies I could ever want installed. (It was modified in order to do this stuff, and by default was only an iPod.)

So, I guess: If you were trying to draw some sort of distinction between the two things somehow, then you have failed.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[dfghjk]

I would say it stops short of replacing everything the user associates with FreeBSD.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[dreamchaser]

Linux is a kernel. Darwin can run on lightweight devices just as the Linux kernel can. That doesn't make the iPhone OS OS X no matter how Apple tries to spin it. It makes it the iPhone OS running a related kernel to it's older sibling.

The spin here is getting increasingly sickening.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[drsmithy]

And not all that much has changed between NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. Anyone who used NeXTSTEP back in the day knows how remarkably little has changed since Apple took it over.

O.o

If a complete lift-and-replace of the GUI/display subsystem, massive kernel updates, major userspace updates, major API revisions, multiple new APIs, a new GUI and a port to a new hardware platform means "little has changed", exactly what needs to be done to say "a lot has changed" ?

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Sir_Lewk]

Of course a linksys router runs linux. Linux is a kernel and a router running linux is certainly making use of a good deal of it's functionality. Even if you were refering to "linux" as a desktop operating system, that comparison is nonsensical because there is not "one set of functionality" associated with desktop linux installs. This comparison is even dumber when you consider linux is traditionally most popular in servers, and chances are your linksys router is indeed running many servers, including a webserver, a dhcp server, and probably a telnet and ssh server.

On the other hand, there is a very good reason people say things like "the iPad doesn't run OSX". Suggesting that is does in anything outside of a technical discussion (ie, marketing materials) is disingenuous at best.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[EvilNTUser]

I refuse to count jailbroken devices. If you have to hack the router in order to get to it, then it's pointless to advertise it as running Linux.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[rgviza]

Whoa! I beg to differ. Open an ssh shell to it. The underlying system is Darwin. It's the same set of core components and kernel that OSX is built from. I've done it and compiled a web server on it, complete with PHP and SSL. It's a base OSX system (think what yellow dog linux is to linux) which you can add any unix software you want to (including GCC). It's just slimmed down. From command line the functionality is identical. The system running on my phone is fully POSIX and UNIX compliant out of the box.

xxxxxxx-iPhone:~ root# uname -a
Darwin xxxxxxx-iPhone 10.0.0d3 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0d3: Fri Sep 25 23:35:35 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1357.5.30~3/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8920X iPhone2,1 arm N88AP Darwin
xxxxxxx-iPhone:/ root# ls -la
total 42
drwxrwxr-t 15 root admin 748 Jan 31 11:46 .
drwxrwxr-t 15 root admin 748 Jan 31 11:46 ..
drwx------ 2 _unknown _unknown 238 Sep 27 18:34 .fseventsd
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 30 Oct 19 12:04 Applications
drwxrwxr-x 2 root admin 68 Sep 26 06:40 Developer
drwxrwxr-x 14 root admin 680 Nov 2 15:03 Library
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Sep 26 04:50 System
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 11 Jan 31 11:46 User -> /var/mobile
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1972 Nov 2 16:26 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 68 Oct 19 12:03 boot
drwxrwxr-t 2 root admin 68 Sep 26 02:04 cores
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 1310 Jan 31 11:46 dev
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 11 Sep 27 18:36 etc -> private/etc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 68 Oct 19 12:03 lib
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 68 Oct 19 12:03 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Oct 19 11:53 private
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1530 Nov 2 16:26 sbin
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 15 Sep 27 18:36 tmp -> private/var/tmp
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 306 Oct 19 12:04 usr
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 11 Sep 27 18:36 var -> private/var

xxxxxxx=myname

---about darwin---
Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects.

Darwin forms the core set of components upon which Mac OS X, Apple TV, and iPhone OS are based. It is compatible with the Single UNIX Specification version 3 (SUSv3) and POSIX UNIX applications and utilities.[2][3]
---end about darwin---

And before you ask, yes I changed the root password when I installed sshd so my phone won't get h4X0red. I did it the day I installed it, not when the "sploit" was released.

As well the kernel version is still stamped 2.1 even though I'm on version 3.1.2. Get on the stick Apple!

To use your own analogy, it's still a chevy drive train, but with a 4 cylinder engine and a different body. It's just a different processor with less memory so you can't fit the entirety of OSX on it, and it's got a different UI.

It has chevy pistons, chevy crank, chevy piston rings, water pump, crank, bearings, and even has AC Delco spark plugs. You also drive it from point A to point B, it has a gas pedal, brake, transmission control and steering wheel, so the most important functionality is there.

The interface is different but it's still a Darwin unix system under the hood, same as OSX. Can it go as fast as a Mac? No. Duh? It fits in the palm of your hand.

You could, given enough hardware resources, compile the mac interface on this OSX but I don't think the mac interface supports the screen resolution comfortably and the hardware requirements are a bit steep. They designed a smartphone interface purpose built to do what the iPhone does and run fast on ARM hardware.

However, the GUI does not equal the operating system ;-)

It's just a GUI. You are right that the _GUI_ functionality is not close to the same. Peel the GUI off and they are nearly i

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Kielistic]

They run Linux, but they certainly don't run Ubuntu.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-WRT

There are some gaps in that table. It is stripped down somewhat for the purposes of the router - same as OS X for the iPhone.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[rgviza]

The GUI is just another program ;) The only difference between OSX and iPhone OS is the underlying hardware and the GUI.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

Well, Apple doesn't call it OS X - they initially did, but have rebranded it as the iPhone OS. It has its base in OS X though, in the same way that Linux routers do, or Linux DVRs.

It's not "spin" so much as a double standard, trying to support an initial statement from the GGGGP that was easily disproved by going to google and typing "what OS runs on the iPhone?".

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[tlhIngan]

Can you treat your router as if it were running a lightweight Linux? Yes. (I'm assuming you can ssh to them, right? I don't have one.)
Can you treat your iPhone as if it were running a lightweight OSX? No.

Back in the pre-App Store days, this was exactly how the app developers wrote their apps for jailbroken devices. They got a GNU Obj-C compiler, and grabbed headers from stock OS X. After all, Apple was insisting no one needed apps, and web apps were "good enough". Thus, no compiler nor headers or other bits were provided from Apple.

Yet the headers were taken straight out of desktop OS X dev tools, as were the API documentation, so the iPhone OS was more or less a cut-down version of OS X. The same libraries existed, the same headers could be used, you just needed a custom-built compiler, some experience developing OS X apps, and remembering which libraries the OS provides. The big difference is that application bundles weren't in bundle format.

The iPhone OS is much closer to OS X than say, Windows Mobile/Phone is to desktop Windows (which don't even share the same kernel or link libraries, or until 7 comes out, has a complete strange slot-style memory and process architecture).

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[JamesP]

Wanna settle the dispute? I would look for the following:

- strings (may get that from the fw image)
- syscalls (number and existence of basic syscalls)
- format of kext and other binaries
- kernel API

Does it match (like, 90%)?! Then iPhone runs OS X

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

So we're not having a technical discussion here? I'm not trying to sell you an iPhone here.

Everything you just said about Linux there can be applied to the OS that is running on the phone - (except the name, since the kernel is not called OS X), but there's more from OS X than just the Darwin system running on there.

The original GPP attempted to make a flippant, unresearched claim that OS X doesn't run on the iPhone, when the iPhone OS is clearly *heavily* based on OS X in the same way that the Linux kernel and services are modified to run on embedded devices of various sizes, shapes and varieties.

What's more this then gets modded informative.

It would be completely accurate to say "the iPhone runs iPhone OS, which is a modified version of OS X with a customised UI", but then how many people say "the OS that runs on Linksis routers is just the Linux kernel, though many people use the term interchangeably (accurately or not) with the desktop+kernel"

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[omfgnosis]

It does and it doesn't. It really depends which unique features make OS X and which don't.

If what makes OS X unique is that it's a BSD/xnu OS with a NeXT-based application framework (Cocoa) and a postscript-derived graphics engine (Quartz), iPhone OS is a variant of OS X.

On the other hand, if what makes OS X unique is all of the above plus a subset of the classic MacOS APIs (Carbon), then it is not.

The rest of the differences are limited to the configuration and window manager. In other words, beyond support for legacy applications that were never on the iPhone platform in the first place, the differences between OS X and iPhone OS are essentially equivalent to the differences between Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

Sure, I'm oversimplifying a bit, but quite a bit less than you did.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[farble1670]

OSX is darwin + aqua. darwin != OSX. the iphone doesn't run OSX.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

After about 2 minutes of googling, it looks like the answer is still "yup, but modified" (as I initially said).

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/07/13/iphone-os-x-architecture-the-mach-kernel-and-ram/

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[TheRaven64]

Yes it does. The kernel is the same. The libc is the same. The window server is the same. The Foundation framework is the same. The majority of the other frameworks are the same, although libobjc does not link against autozone. AppKit is replaced by UIKit, but that's the only nontrivial difference. There are more differences between a Linux desktop running KDE and one running GNOME than there are between desktop and iPhone OS X.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[nine-times]

The GUI is just another program

Well but that's a question. Some people identify that "operating system" as essentially being the kernel. To some people, it's the kernel plus some other stuff. For others, it's everything that comes on the system when you install it, before you go looking for other applications. So are Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS? Are OSX and Darwin the same OS?

iPhone OS is certainly based on OSX, but I don't know off hand how much they stripped out. I know a lot of the normal Unix userland stuff is missing.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[mdwh2]

So in other words, it doesn't. Might as well claim that phones out there can run Windows 7, because Windows Mobile is a "scaled down version optimised for a handheld device".

Got multitasking working yet? I'm not sure it's a particularly good claim to say that IphoneOS is OS X, unless you want to make OS X look bad... It was the original MacOS that couldn't ever multitask!

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[drsmithy]

None of those changes should require more processing power. In fact, many of them should require significantly less!

What makes you say that ? It's pretty much completely wrong.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[adolf]

I generally agree.

I just refuse to count jailbreaking as anything more off-the-wall than any other mundane task like, say, opening a web browser, or finding a DHCP address. Every device I own that has hack value, aside from my LCD TV and PS3, is open (by jailbreaking or other less-cryptic means) for me to do what I want with it. (The car's got a couple of hacks, too.)

And so, for me, it seems useful to know what the underlying system is.

Others may not see it that way.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

The iPhone multitasks right now. No need to "get it working".

Whether your primary apps can run simultaneously however, is up to Apple.

At least you didn't say "what happens when you want to listen to your music and browse the web at the same time?" and got +5 insightful, when the iPhone does actually do that already. heh.

(and I understand why the iPhone doesn't allow multiple concurrent third party apps to run, but I do think there should be a menu option to enable it if you understand what it means for a limited platform - I may be an Apple fan, but they're not above criticism. That way, the user experience is maintained, but you offer more flexibility for more savvy users).

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[khellendros1984]

The iPhone runs the Darwin kernel, which is the same kernel at the core of OSX. From my iPod Touch:
Khed:~ mobile$ uname -a
Darwin Khed 9.4.1 Darwin Kernel Version 9.4.1: Mon Dec 8 20:59:30 PST 2008; root:xnu-128.7.37~4/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8900X iPod1,1 arm N45AP Darwin

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[khellendros1984]

Un-jailbroken devices are still running the same underlying system. I can't treat a locked-down public library computer as if it's running Windows (can't access the hard drive, can't install applications, can't open some file types, etc). By your standards, that's no longer a Windows machine. IPhone OS is essentially a locked-down, somewhat stripped version of OSX.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[khellendros1984]

I don't think there's a menu option...but I've got a program that allows for backgrounding of 3rd party applications (as well as force-quitting Apple applications). Of course, it's a jailbreak modification, but if the functionality wasn't present in the OS, it's not likely that any application could add the functionality in.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[Darkmane]

Car analogy taken to the next level!

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[dreamchaser]

I was referring to the spin by the hordes of rabid Koolaid drinking self proclaimed geeks who think Apple is Heaven and Steve Jobs is God.

Apple rebranded it because it's not OS X. Unfortunately that seems to give nightmares to some of the less secure folk around here (not you).

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[jo_ham]

Why don't I get invited to all the koolaid drinking parties?

iPhone OS shares a good 70% of its codebase with OS X, so it is the same in all but name really, although it's obviously stripped down.

Re:Phones more powerful than NeXTstations!

[dreamchaser]

Yeah that was really my main point. There's a lot more to an OS than the kernel and system code.

So where is BeOS?

[rimcrazy]

Come on, if your going to do worthless things why not go for the whole enchilada?

Re:So where is BeOS?

[the linux geek]

I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work, since Maemo runs QEMU. Probably a hell of a lot faster than OSX, too.

Re:So where is BeOS?

[mister_playboy]

Haiku would be even better.

Re:So where is BeOS?

[TheRaven64]

There was talk about a year ago of an ARM port of Haiku. Not sure what happened to it, but most recent ARM cores are massively overpowered for BeOS so it would be a very nice OS for something like a netbook.

Re:Surprised at the time required

[the linux geek]

Do you not see the difference between Mac OS running under emulation and Mac OS running natively?

New word accepted

[Anonymous Coward]

appifization v.

The application of DRM by vendors, to create lock-in and walled gardens for software.

O_o

[SixDimensionalArray]

Now if I could just get Windows Vista booting on my TI-82!

Re:O_o

[gijsterbeek]

I tried that once, but then the installer complained about a missing driver for the "Window" button...

Re:O_o

[CortoMaltese]

Now if I could just get Windows Vista booting on my TI-82!

Tell me when you're done, and I'll run it on the TI-82 on my N900. ;)

Re:O_o

[SixDimensionalArray]

Bada bing! Well played! :) 6d

Re:Surprised at the time required

[larry bagina]

That ghetto netbook probably isn't an ARM processor emulating a PowerPC.

Love It

[LearnToSpell]

I hate to sound like the eternal nuthugger, but I'm having so much fun with my N900. Just threw on the cifs-mounting stuff, and that combined (alternated, really) with sshfs means I can take my entire music collection wherever I go. 1.5TB, ripped to flac on a server in my basement, so why would I want to have to choose what albums I take with me to the gym or work or wherever? Just mount the thing and play. Plus, there's an FM transmitter built-in, so I can just plunk it down next to (~15 feet) a radio, and fire it up.

The "it's so slow" comments are kind of silly. This is obviously a POC, and a pretty nice one. Any phone that can run Asterisk, Apache, nmap and OSX is cool in my book. :)

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Nokia pissed me off to no end with the N900. I was waiting for the thing, postponing any phone related purchases .... and when it comes out it turns out that it does not support the 3G system offered in Canada by Rogers (and apparently also by AT&T in the US). EDGE only. Which at the price tag the thing comes with renders the entire excercise rather pointless (and no WiFi is not an acceptable fall-back for many of us).

All I can say is: Fucketey Fuck!

Re:Love It

[shutdown -p now]

Nokia pissed me off to no end with the N900. I was waiting for the thing, postponing any phone related purchases .... and when it comes out it turns out that it does not support the 3G system offered in Canada by Rogers (and apparently also by AT&T in the US). EDGE only.

Nokia is a European company, so they use European UMTS frequency bands (which, by the way, also happen to be used in most of the world). Blame North America for trying to be different there, not Nokia for going for the largest worldwide coverage.

In USA, you still have the option of T-Mobile, anyway.

Re:Love It

[wjbaird]

I bought a N900 to use on Rogers a week and a half ago... Of course, I'd prefer having 3G, but I have wifi the majority of places I spend a lot of time, and the EDGE access is Ok for emergency web browsing when I don't have wifi...

Of course, I was coming from a openmoko freerunner that only did GPRS, not even EDGE, so EDGE seems pretty speedy...

YMMV

Re:Love It

[roju]

I've read that WIND uses the right frequencies to use the N900 at 3G speeds. Apparently they may even be bringing it to Canada officially. People are running it right now though, just self-imported from the States.

Re:Love It

[Neil Watson]

The N900 will work on Windmobile's network at full speed. Wind is rumored to be selling the phone soon but for now they say you can use your own N900 with their SIM cards. Dave Wireless is supposed to run on the same frequencies as Wind but Dave is not on line yet.

Re:Love It

[Clueless Moron]

It will probably work with the new WIND mobile network though. They use UMTS AWS band IV (1700/2100). My Nokia E90 picks up the 2100 downlink.

Personally I use the Wifi on the E90 quite a bit. VoIP calling is really cheap.

Re:Love It

[Verdatum]

Should we blame Nokia? Should we blame the telcos? Or should we blame the standards organization, ISO? NO! Blame Canada! Blame Canada! (and so on)

Re:Love It

[mister_playboy]

i have a 32GB iphone. i have only 80GB of music. if i listened to music on my iphone 24x7 it would take me weeks to listen to everything once. who cares about having access to your entire music collection if it's going to take you 5 years to listen to it?

He said he collection was in FLAC, so it will take up much more space than your (most likely) mp3s. Probably not "5 years worth" of music.

i don't even listen to full albums anymore. i have a bunch of smart playlists with different conditions and one with only my favorite songs from the entire collection. and my faves playlist is over 1000 songs and if i could i would cut it down to 100 or so to sync to my iphone but maybe in a future version of itunes.

Whole albums have an important place in many kinds of music I like, such as progressive metal and classical. I always listen to whole albums at a time (or pick up where I left off if I have to split the session up). The usefulness of albums is mainly dictated by your favorite genre of music.

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Blame North America for trying to be different there, not Nokia for going for the largest worldwide coverage

Nokia could have made a phone that supports all the global standards, many such phones exist. They chose not to do so. What you are saying is that we should blame England when some car maker decides not to make a Right Hand Drive car for Japanese or New Zealand market. It is the maker's choice, the "responsiblity" is not on the whole historical chain of decisions that lead to the establishment of a particular national system.

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

WIND is at this point a startup, covering some parts of Toronto only. It will be years before they have a national coverage to speak of.

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

As I mentioned to another poster, WIND is a pipe-dream at this point. They barely have some minimal coverage in Toronto and judging by the scale of infrastructure required, it will be years before they are a viable option in the rest of the country. And DAve is not even that far along (i.e. their business is comprised nearly entirely of press releases).

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

See above about WIND and its viability. In some areas of Toronto you might get away with it .... and that's just about it for years to come.

As to WiFi I live and work in an area where hot-spots are rarer than hen's teeth.

Re:Love It

[Miamicanes]

> Blame North America for trying to be different there

It has nothing to do with "trying to be different", and everything to do with pre-existing services.

1900MHz was mostly owned by Sprint in America several *years* before UMTS was even an acronym, let alone a real service that existed anywhere in the world -- Europe or otherwise. T-Mobile owned a few slivers here and there (mostly in smaller cities), but most of THOSE slivers represented their *entire spectrum* within that market, and the frequencies were already being used for their existing GSM customers. In other words, from the perspective of any single carrier, there WAS no incremental transition path.

Interesting fact: T-Mobile's 1900 spectrum came from Voicestream. Voicestream was actually created by Sprint as a way to sell off excess 1900MHz spectrum it didn't need. However, Sprint wanted to make sure it would never be a serious competitor, so the spun-off company literally owned the bare minimum spectrum necessary for GSM voice service to work. At one point a few years ago, their spectrum shortage was so severe, there were actually markets where they weren't allowed to sign up new customers for a few months due to saturation problems.

Sprint? They owned lots of 1900MHz spectrum, but they had a similar problem to T-Mobile: there are a few markets around the US where they just don't own enough 1900MHz spectrum to deploy 1900/2100UMTS (with 5MHz channels) alongside their existing 2.5MHz CDMA2000 customers. Plus, when the 1700/2100 auctions took place 3 years ago, Sprint was low on funds, and would have had to buy 1700MHz spectrum they have no need for in addition to the 2100MHz spectrum.

Even if AT&T Wireless (and the companies it acquired along the way, like BellSouth Mobility/Cingular) had known that 1900UMTS was coming when the 1900MHz spectrum was originally auctioned off in the 90s, they wouldn't have been able to afford it, because they would have been bidding against Sprint -- a company whose entire business plan could have been summed up as, "Pay whatever it takes to own a chunk of spectrum everywhere in America". Not to mention the fact that when the 1900 spectrum was auctioned off, 2100MHz was still owned by the US military.

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Actually the "blame" for the different band allocation lies with history. Many frequencies were allocated to different services in Europe and North America, some of these services having not existed in one place or another. When the advent of cellular phones came about, the companies got what was available at the moment. The European HDSPA (aka 3G) bands were used by different things in the USA and Canada and so different bands were allocated. This of course keeps changing as some older services become obsolete and some new bands become available for other uses.

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Blame North America for trying to be different there, not Nokia for going for the largest worldwide coverage.

Also, as some already pointed out, "being different" in this case means "having existing use for the frequencies due to historically far more extensive utilization of radio frequencies", whereas Europe (and much of the rest of the world), starting form essentially a blank slate, had the luxury of picking whatever frequencies struck their fancy, looong after those same frequencies were already in use in North America.

In essence your argument is to demand that US and Canada remake their roads for Right-Hand Drive cars because some British car maker is too lazy or greedy to bother with making a Left-Hand Drive model for the US market. Oh and redo all the bolts in use in the USA to metric while we are at it...

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Sour grapes. It's not like the information about supported networks is difficult to find. Maybe next time you'll do your research before irresponsibly throwing down your dollars.

Huh? That is because I did my research that I did not buy the phone. Its UMTS band usage was not known however before its release and based on hype a lot of people waited for it, myself included, only to be disappointed when it finally arrived.

Re:Love It

[Verdatum]

Well duh. But that explanation doesn't fit to the tune of "Blame Canada" from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut nearly as well.

Re:Love It

[gmhowell]

All that hockey hullabaloo and that bitch Anne Murray too!

Re:Love It

[mirix]

I'd like to think that if everywhere on earth less the americas could free up 900/1800 for GSM, surely we could too.

It's just like how we were stuck with NTSC *way* past expiry date, because we didn't want to screw the people that had TV's from the 40's. Then, instead of hurting early adopters, and making a clean break to a superior standard, the old standard reaches critical mass and we are stuck with it into the 21st century.

Now everyone has to make two models of phones and transmitters (or frequency agile versions) which makes the cost as a whole go up, and hurts interoperability. anyways. whatever. I hate partially broken standardization.

What was 900MHz allocated to in the US anyways? stupid home cordless phones?

Re:Love It

[gmhowell]

i have a 32GB iphone. i have only 80GB of music. if i listened to music on my iphone 24x7 it would take me weeks to listen to everything once. who cares about having access to your entire music collection if it's going to take you 5 years to listen to it?

i don't even listen to full albums anymore. i have a bunch of smart playlists with different conditions and one with only my favorite songs from the entire collection. and my faves playlist is over 1000 songs and if i could i would cut it down to 100 or so to sync to my iphone but maybe in a future version of itunes.

Because if I get a bug up my ass to listen to a particular tune or album, I want that tune or album, not some substitute.

Re:Love It

[IgnoramusMaximus]

What was 900MHz allocated to in the US anyways? stupid home cordless phones?

Many things, some of it were cordless phones (and a lot of other unlicensed stuff like garage openers and what not), some portions were military, etc.

If FCC decided to give it to cell phones, the result would have been pretty useless: the phones would simply not work in the face of interference from millions of all sorts of devices and vice versa, home phones, garage openers and what not would not work in the proximity of cell phones. In other words: total chaos.

Trying to get people off the 900MHz band while millions upon millions of devices are in use would have been a multi-decade undertaking consisting basically of trying to outlast the devices as they break, since no home owner is going to get rid of his garage opener until it falls apart.

Re:Love It

[mgblst]

I guess ripping to flac really pays off when your playing it over the FM radio.

But seriously, in which country do you live where you get unlimited 3g data?

Re:Love It

[muckracer]

> means I can take my entire music collection wherever I go. 1.5TB, ripped to flac

Good thing, you didn't rip it into OGG... :-/

GNUstep?

[sznupi]

Sure, GNUstep is not NeXTSTEP proper, but it has its heart in the right place.

There shouldn't be many problems with installing it on N900, which after all runs basically just Debian on ARM (perhaps GNUstep is already in some appropriate ARM repository). Without any emulation needed and GNUstep being very light, this should be actually quite snappy.

Obligatory

[IDK]

But does it run Linux?

So where is z/OS . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . now get *that* running on your Nokia N900 . . . I see your enchilada and raise you a chimichanga . . .

Somewhat unrelated, but

[nightfire-unique]

Though this isn't directly related to running OSX on the n900, I just wanted to add that.. I'm not surprised.

A while back I posted a story that was rejected, asking if any fellow /.'ers had any experience with the n900 from a Unix admin's perspective. To me it seemed like a dream-come-true device: high-res screen, fast CPU, lots of ram... and most importantly, running Debian.

I had to find out, so I bought one about 3 weeks ago. It really, truly is a dream-come-true device.

I swear I'm not affiliated with Nokia in any way; I'm a Unix admin for a largish web firm. But if anyone else is wondering, yes it runs a Debian-derived OS. Yes, you can SSH into it as root, over 3G/GPRS, even if the phone is "off." Yes, crond works. Yes it runs native X11 and you can run your X11 apps (ie. directory manager, xterms, vncviewer, pidgin, openoffice/koffice, etc). Yes it's stable. The keyboard is usable, the UI is quick, and task switching is a breeze. The filesystem layout is mostly sensible, and you can apt-get dist-upgrade to get updates directly from Nokia (and other repositories)!

That blew me away when I first saw it so let me say it again: Nokia is using apt to send updates OTA to the phone! Proper version tagging and dependency management, on a phone!

It doesn't suspend like the crappy Zaurus did... when you hit the power switch, it shuts off the screen and (I believe) encourages the processor to drop to a very slow cycle rate (unless something heavy is running). So your apps continue to run. Battery life is ~16-24h with a constant GSM data/wifi connection, so you must charge every night. But it's so worth it.

Everything about it is done the way this 15-year Linux/Solaris admin thinks it should be done.

So, back (slightly) on-topic.. it doesn't surprise me in the least that they got OSX to boot under an emulator. The n900 is quite literally a pocket Debian workstation that happens to have a GSM radio onboard.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[Nexus7]

I don't take issue with most everything you said, in fact I and my N900 whole-heartedly agree (although N900 had me at 'df -h').

But, "crappy Zaurus"?

It (my SL6000) ran Linux, tethered to my Nokia over Bluetooth and let me surf the web at EDGE on a train on a gorgeous 4" VGA screen, had a very usable (for thumbing) keyboard, and SSH too... and all that in 2004.

You just didn't like that it couldn't use .debs, right?

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[CortoMaltese]

Everything about it is done the way this 15-year Linux/Solaris admin thinks it should be done.

Ah, I see that you're still on honeymoon with your N900. It's got its wrinkles. Try 'cat /etc/sudoers' for a start. But I do agree with most of what you say. It is an amazing device.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[EvilNTUser]

What do you object to in /etc/sudoers? I looked at it, but it was so long I didn't bother checking everything.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[Bob The Cowboy]

Sounds wonderful... if only it would work on Verizon's network :o(

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[Culture20]

What do you object to in /etc/sudoers? I looked at it, but it was so long I didn't bother checking everything.

From what I read online, it looks like any user is granted root privs without a password. So if you've got apache installed, and someone finds/uses a vulnerability, they can make the apache user switch to root unless you've locked down sudoers.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[cras]

By default sudo gives just an error about "switch your device to R&D mode if you want to break your device". You have to install a separate gainroot package to do it without R&D mode. Anyone who does either of those should be experienced enough to realize what the consequences are.

Of course, allowing ALL users rather than just the normal "user" to get root privileges is worse. And yes, a quick look at /etc/sudoers does look as if any user could simply do that. But I just tried:

1. start xterm
2. sudo gainroot
3. su (some other user than "user")
4. sudo gainroot -> it asks for password!
5. su user
6. sudo gainroot -> it works (just as in step 2)

So the user named "user" apparently is checked in (all? of) those scripts that sudo is allowed to execute. It's perfect. Just what you'd expect.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[21mhz]

Oh yes, better lock it down. Also, change the root password from 'rootme'.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[rgviza]

A better idea than an emulator, which will happen by the way, is to simply implement a good copy of the iPhone's interface on this.
check out the LG Vu mods to see what I'm talking about... www.lg-vu.com

GUIs are comparatively simple to copy. Much better than trying to emulate an OS. With the hardware this thing has a gui copy will run just as fast as a native iphone if it's done right and the underlying OS is efficient.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[nightfire-unique]

I know it's too late for this response now, but hope you read it anyway. :)

I had a c760, and it was the device I wanted to love, so much. I built custom distros, ran pdaXrom, openzaurus/angstrom, the stock rom... you name it. Had a wifi card, bluetooth card, 2gb SD card.. It was way ahead of its time.

And that was my problem with it. It just.. didn't.. work.. properly. It froze, it failed to resume, it had no onboard radios (so you were stuck with either 802.11 or BT). It didn't have enough RAM, and it had a useless 256mb ROM that constantly corrupted itself. Sharp utterly abandoned the product. Linux 2.6 support was too little, too late (due to all custom hardware with little driver porting incentive).

I also hated ipkg... yes. :)

It was a valiant attempt, but filled me with sorrow. The N900, on the other hand, is the Zaurus Done Right.

Re:Somewhat unrelated, but

[nightfire-unique]

Ok, I talked it up a little. But I've gone far past the honeymoon phase... I already rewrote my sudoers (so I can just sudo su - with a password), changed the hostname, set up openvpn, cleaned up the filesystem layout, and recently I've been playing with the sound engine, trying to hack in a more useful equalizer.

It has some issues, sure... but amazingly few for a device only 2 months old. I have confidence Nokia will address them in the upcoming updates, and if not... hey ... more hacking. :)

It doesn't run OSX.

[Rufty]

It barely even crawls OSX. (Cool hack, though.)

complain to Congress

[pydev]

That's not Nokia's fault. In order to cover the US market, they would have to offer different versions for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval. And the reason for that mess is because the FCC and Congress have failed to set standards for mobile telecommunications.

That's one of the many reasons the US mobile market is so terribly backwards and overpriced: there is no competition, and monopolies are enforced through technology.

Re:complain to Congress

[IgnoramusMaximus]

That's not Nokia's fault. In order to cover the US market, they would have to offer different versions for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint.

Nobody is expecting them to make a CDMA phone. But as to GSM and friends, there are many phones that support all the global standards, the decision was purely discretionary on Nokia's part.

Re:complain to Congress

[Miamicanes]

> Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval.

Not quote. There's no technical reason why a single phone approved by the FCC couldn't be used on both Sprint and Verizon, or on AT&T and T-Mobile... it's mainly the carriers' fault.

Basically, the FCC requires any phone with unique hardware and radio firmware to be tested & approved. Sprint won't allow its customers to use Verizon-branded phones, and Verizon won't sell phones that aren't built to be "Uniquely Verizon". Thus, it would almost be beyond pointless for a manufacturer to pay to get FCC approval for a generic CDMA phone, because Sprint wouldn't allow it to be used, and Verizon wouldn't buy a million of them to resell to its customers.

The AT&T/T-Mobile situation is a little blurrier. It appears that right now, AT&T has a company policy of refusing to sell phones capable of 1700/2100 UMTS, and T-Mobile has a company policy of refusing to sell phones capable of 850MHz UMTS. Neither company will actually stop a customer from buying one himself and sticking the SIM card into it, but the market (right now) for unsubsidized handsets in the US is somewhere between "barely relevant" and "all but nonexistent". As a practical matter, there are exactly two American customers that manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola care about: AT&T and T-Mobile.

Need more proof of corporate policy dictating handset frequency availability? Watch the FCC submissions logs. I can almost guarantee that there will be two distinct versions of the iPhone 4 submitted to the FCC -- one that does 850MHz and 1900/2100 UMTS, and one that does 1700/2100 and 1900/2100. What's really sad is that they'll both probably have the same hardware, and differ only in their radio firmware. It'll suck for everyone... Europeans will have to decide whether they'd rather roam on AT&T or T-Mobile when they visit the US, and American iPhones will effectively be locked to AT&T or T-Mobile -- at least, for anyone buying one to use in the US with 3G data.

Re:complain to Congress

[pydev]

Sprint won't allow its customers to use Verizon-branded phones, and Verizon won't sell phones that aren't built to be "Uniquely Verizon"

Yes, and Congress and the FCC could require all phones to use the same standard and frequencies.

Need more proof of corporate policy dictating handset frequency availability?

I don't need any proof at all. I'm saying Congress should grow some balls and put an end to this madness by law.

Re:complain to Congress

[pydev]

No, sorry, there aren't many phones that support both AT&T and T-Mobile. Not even Nokia's previous top-end world business phone, the E90, does.

Re:complain to Congress

[farble1670]

seems like it's more about reducing competition. right now, US citizens largely choose their carrier based on the phone they want. the carriers, for the most part, don't compete on services because that's not why people are picking them in the first place. if i want an iphone i go to AT&T (then whine about it on slashdot). if i want a droid i go to verizon.

if the carriers used the same frequencies, they'd have to actually compete on their services ... the coverage and speed of their networks, their customer service, and their price plans. now, that would be terribly expensive for all of them. they'd rather just get customers based on the latest shiny new phone they are pushing this month.

Re:complain to Congress

[Miamicanes]

Well, there's one problem with REQUIRING both 850 and 1700/2100 -- it costs more to make a phone capable of doing both. From what I've read, at worst, the only difference between a phone built for 1700/2100 and a phone built for 1900/2100 is a few passive component values determined at build time. At best, it's purely a matter of firmware and regulatory approval. On the other hand, a phone that does BOTH 850MHz *and* 1700&|1900/2100 needs two radio subsystems.

Going purely by engineering cost-benefit and completely disregarding matters of politics, the most sensible compromise would probably be for the FCC to require that any phone capable of 1900/2100UMTS *also* be capable of 1700/2100UMTS. As a practical matter, it would affect mainly AT&T and Apple. AT&T, because international compatibility is one of their selling points, so most of their phones support 850 and 1900/2100. Apple, because their phones have to work with AT&T and also work outside the US.

To keep things fair for AT&T, the FCC could try to come up with some rule that basically says, "If you make a phone that does 850MHz plus 1700/1900/2100, then turn around and try to disable the 850MHz via software or the omission of literally a few cents worth of passive components, it won't be approved". The problem is defining it in a way that would prevent a company like HTC from trivially disabling 850MHz support just to pacify T-Mobile, but wouldn't require that 850Mhz support be added to a handset that otherwise has no reason to support it. It's kind of like defining porn... any halfwit can look at something blatant, like a circuit board with missing components and a chipset spec'ed to do 850 and realize that something's rotten in Denmark, but it becomes a serious judgment call if eliminating those components genuinely enables some kind of improvement.

As for Sprint-vs-Verizon, THEIR forced incompatibility is just stupid. All the FCC would need to do in THAT case is prohibit Sprint from refusing to activate non-Sprint phones, and require both Sprint and Verizon to support phones with R-UIM cards. It wouldn't even have to go so far as to require that Sprint & Verizon sell phones that use R-UIM cards... just require that they allow otherwise-compatible phones that use them, and require that they sell the cards to customers who want to buy them. Knowing Sprint & Verizon, at first they'd probably charge $999 per R-UIM card or require a 10 year contract to get one. In the long run, neither Sprint nor Verizon really want to support them, but if they were both forced to do it, eventually they'd start using them to compete with each other. For now, they're still enjoying the final months of a decade-long data duopoly. With a little luck, by this time next year, T-Mobile will be a viable alternative to them in most parts of the US.

Re:complain to Congress

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Recent high-end phones do: Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC Dream (the US version has both), etc.

Re:complain to Congress

[pydev]

Well, there's one problem with REQUIRING both 850 and 1700/2100 -- it costs more to make a phone capable of doing both.

Who said anything about that? 3G is a lost cause in the US.

But the US could fix a future generation of cell phone service (maybe 4G, otherwise 5G) by making rational frequency allocations and demanding standard. That kind of planning needs to be 5-10 years ahead of deployment.

Re:complain to Congress

[Kumiorava]

N900 has 900/1700/2100MHz UMTS, so the radio subsystems should be there for 850/1900MHz UMTS support. I think better reason is that this phone was geared towards rest of the world and Japan + US/Canada UMTS were covered with 1700MHz support.

Re:complain to Congress

[Miamicanes]

You forget, Americans are cowboys and pioneers -- neither of which are known for having respect for tradition or concern for what's happening after next year. Europeans hold meetings for 5 years, plan things in micro-managed detail, and roll them out over the next decade in a neat & orderly fashion, with the intent of keeping things unchanged for the next 10-100 years afterward. Americans do things the most expedient way possible to make it work *now* while spending as little money as possible, on the assumption that it's all going to be obsolete, trashed and replaced within a few years anyway. C'est la vie. Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

Case in point: WiMax (Sprint) vs LTE (Verizon, and eventually just about everyone else on earth). Sprint has nothing against LTE per se, besides the fact that they want a 4G network to brag about and claw ahead of T-Mobile and Verizon right now, and LTE would have meant having to wait another year or two. One reason why Sprint is so determined to get WiMax *now* was due to Qualcomm's decision to abandon EV-DV in favor of EV-DO(rev. A & B) "for now" and LTE "for later". The problem with EV-DO is that you can't have simultaneous voice and data with EV-DO, and Sprint knows quite well that T-Mobile is going to have a field day making sure everyone in America knows that Sprint & Verizon can't do voice and data at the same time. EV-DV would have allowed both, and Sprint wanted to skip EV-DO more or less entirely and go straight to it. Unfortunately, Qualcomm wasn't willing to go further developing EV-DV without the interest of at least one other major carrier (US, South American, Asian, or otherwise), and everyone else was content to live with EV-DO for now until LTE was ready.

Is it good or bad? The truth is, in America, it's neither good nor bad... it just "is". On one hand, by the time T-Mobile's new 3G service has filled in the worst of its remaining gaps and is the equal peer of Sprint & Verizon's current EV-DO service, Sprint will be bragging about its own new, faster, technically-superior network, and mercilessly beating up on Verizon with ads criticizing them for being unable to "talk and surf at the same time". On the other hand, 5-10 years from now, Sprint's decision will probably look kind of short-sighted when everyone else is using LTE... especially if there ends up being no graceful evolutionary path to migrate WiMax users to LTE, with both standards coexisting in the same spectrum for a decade or more.

Re:complain to Congress

[pydev]

Is it good or bad? The truth is, in America, it's neither good nor bad...

Of course it's bad: cell phone service in the US is expensive, has poor coverage, is monopolistic, and is less technologically advanced than it is in Europe.

I think Europeans regulate far too much. But if the market fails to work well in the US after operating for more than a decade, while other nations are doing really well with simple, specific regulation, maybe it's time for the US to adopt such regulation as well.

Re:complain to Congress

[Miamicanes]

> Of course it's bad: cell phone service in the US is expensive,

For people who make 5 minutes worth of outgoing calls per month? Yeah. For people who use slingbox to stream videos from their livingroom DVRs, or use their home PC via remote desktop from a laptop tethered to their cell phone? It's dirt cheap. You could probably fit every European who's used Slingbox for more than 5 minutes in the dining room of a small McDonalds. Americans bitch about the threat of getting dropped as a customer for using more than 5GB of wireless data per month. I shudder to think of how much 5 gigabytes of wireless data use would even COST anywhere in Europe.

> has poor coverage,

Compared to Finland, Belgium, or the Netherlands? Maybe. Compare T-mobile's 3G coverage in the rural parts of Britain to Sprint & Verizon's 3G coverage in rural parts of the US, and it's almost dead even. Factor out any patch of land more than a hundred miles from the nearest city with at least 100 residents (ie, most of the western US desert), and the US probably comes out ahead. If you want to be fair and compare "apples to apples", compare T-Mobile's 3G coverage map for Florida to T-Mobile's 3G coverage map for Britain. Especially in the more suburban and rural areas, their Florida 3G coverage would probably make more than a few of their British customers jealous.

> is monopolistic,

Change it to "a pair of duopolies", and I'll generally agree.

> and is less technologically advanced than it is in Europe.

No, it's not. Today, with UMTS (in areas with 3G coverage), Europeans finally get to enjoy the soft hand-offs, diveristy tuning, and superior audio fidelity of CDMA that American Sprint and Verizon customers have been enjoying for more than a decade. Amplified speakers didn't start making "GSM Noise" until, er, GSM became common here.

For the most part, the only thing that really sucks about American cell phone companies is the fact that they're such assholes about trying to turn every handset into a mini-monopoly.

n900 - port iphone os to it!

[ardiri]

10.3 was powerpc specific - and you can see from the screen shot that they are using pearpc - a powerpc emulation engine.

what would be much more interesting is to port iphone os to the n900 - it has an ARM cpu and should be able to run about the same speed as the iphone itself - that is more a challenge. putting msdos on symbian, android, iphone os, windows mobile is simply a matter of porting dosbox or so; when will someone take on the true challenge :) take a recovery image and flash it to an ARM device with similar specs.. should be doable :)

Re:n900 - port iphone os to it!

[ascari]

Even cooler - port OS X (or any general purpose operating system) to iPhone.

Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[Jonathan]

If you jailbreak an iPhone, you can open a terminal window running bash. If you type "uname -a" you'll see that iPhones run Darwin (the actual OS behind OS X), just like Macintoshes.

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[Delkster]

I once ran Darwin in a virtual machine on my Linux desktop. It didn't look much like full OS X to me.

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[dfghjk]

Darwin isn't OS X.

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[Jonathan]

Then what *is* "OS X" to you if not Darwin? The Finder? I was really skeptical before jailbreaking my iPhone that there was an operating system at all. But there clearly is -- you can even ssh into your jailbroken iPhone, install gcc, run perl, python, and ruby -- basically anything you can do on the command line of OS X.

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[omfgnosis]

You were skeptical that there was an OS at all? What did you think it ran on, wishes and unicorns?

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[Jonathan]

Most electronic devices don't have an OS. Your microwave has a microprocessor but doesn't have an OS.

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[omfgnosis]

So... answer the question. If it does not run an operating system—instructions that operate the system (pardon both the oversimplification and the glibness)—what on earth does it run? Does the processor really have instructions for every function the iPhone presents or allows, as well as instructions for drawing the pixels of each UI control and animation? Does it gain new instructions when encountering arbitrary code from the Internet?

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[mdwh2]

Yes, we know it's also based on Darwin. That doesn't make it the same as OS X.

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[Jonathan]

An API is not an OS. Nor is a command loop. Yes, it is obvious that the iPhone has an API and some sort of command loop, but there is no reason to assume there was an actual operating system behind that. Again, many consumer electronics products get by without anything analogous to an OS, and they don't have processors with "instructions for every function" either.

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[omfgnosis]

Instead of being deliberately obtuse, can you explain what makes an "OS" an "OS", and how that's distinguished from the system software operating those devices?

Re:Try jailbreaking an iPhone -- it really is

[badkarmadayaccount]

Gotta try that design sometime. Sounds almost reasonable. Think about it.

Re:Mac 2010 is now Vista

[Culture20]

it took almost 2 hours to reach the "About my Mac..." window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is.

People used to say, "Windows 95 is Mac 84." The roles have now reversed.

"Mac 10.3 is Windows 7"?

Atom @ 1+ GHz vs. ARM @ 600MHz

[itomato]

Surprised at the time? How about being surprised that the n900 is a phone running a PowerPC emulator, which, when initially released didn't run OS X any faster.

ARM > PearPC > XNU

Atom > XNU

No direct comparison may be made. XNU runs natively on Atom cores (or used to). For the n900, XNU PPC is running on an *emulated* cpu, running on a low-power, essentially PDA-class CPU.

Personally, I am downright impressed with the time required. My n810 would barf.

Re:Mac 2010 is now Vista

[jbeaupre]

Ah crap! Yet another reason not to use Windows 7.

Yet another crappy summary

[Hognoxious]

Not so much running as walking, hobbling or crawling.

Re:Mac 2010 is now Vista

[cheftw]

People used to say, "Windows 95 is Mac 84." The roles have now reversed.

So now "Windows 95 is Mac 84." says people?

That's deep man.

Re:Mac 2010 is now Vista

[Culture20]

People used to say, "Windows 95 is Mac 84." The roles have now reversed.

So now "Windows 95 is Mac 84." says people?

That's deep man.

Wow, I shouldn't have eaten the brownies in the lunch room. Now arbitrary strings are being anthropomorphized.

Perfect Slashdot 'Phone

[dunsurfin]

I agree. The N900 is pretty much the ideal 'phone for the Slashdot crowd. I was pretty surprised that there was not more commentary on the N900 here - it is more open than the Nexus One or the Milestone, with more features than you can shake a stick at.

Re:Perfect Slashdot 'Phone

[trouser]

If only the Slashdot crowd were the ideal crowd for the Slashdot, like in the olden days before the LOLWTFBBQ element took all the fun out of the world.

Re:Linux?

[CyberDragon777]

The Nokia N900 is an ARM CPU phone that runs Maemo OS which is based on Debian Linux that runs PearPC which is a PowerPC emulator that runs Apple OS X 10.3 which is Darwin which is BSD.

Or something like that.

Warning!

[WML MUNSON]

The N900 may jeopardize your marriage.

--
Sent from my Nokia N900

Re:AH, what about memory?

[leamanc]

With OS X 10.3 (which is running on the Nokia in question here), the minimum RAM requirement was 128 MB (source). It's only been since 10.5 that the RAM requirements have been that high, or IIRC that the installer even warns you about your low RAM.

The real question is why they are using PearPC to emulate the PowerPC architecture? Wouldn't an x86 version of OS X be easier to get up and running, and maybe even approach something usable? Or, as posted above, try run the iPhone OS instead?

Obligatory /. meme

[jonaskoelker]

Just wonder, only 12 minutes to "About this Mac"... sweet!

Yeah yeah, but imagine OS X running in parallel over a Beowulf cluster of these!

Obligatory /. meme

[jonaskoelker]

Yeah, but does it run... oh wait, yeah, it does run Linux.

Awesome(ly)!

It wouldn't be slow enough to be news.

[itomato]

BeOS would be a yawn inducer. The biggest gripe would be a lack of Flash in NetPositive.

How can you read slashdot and have an Iphone

[nibbles2004]

i think the Iphone is a toy like speak and spell, fun but a toy, there should be a N900 requirement to have slashdot in your favourites,

Definitely an emulator

[Casandro]

It's definitely an emulator. Otherwise you couldn't run closed source software.

OS /= GUI

[krischik]

A Linux without KDE or GNOME does not look like what you expect from a modern Linux to look like either.

Re:OS /= GUI

[Delkster]

Sure OS != GUI technically, but let's face it, most people associate OS X with the entire default software package on the Mac, not just a barebones OS. If you say that iPhone runs OS X, you'd expect it to behave close to OS X on the user level as well, not just to run the same kernel, base libraries and middleware.

As for the Linux comparison, if you say you run, say, SUSE, most people will expect you to have a desktop as well because SUSE is an entire collection of software built on top of the barebones Linux operating system, and it tends to have the GUI as well.

In other words:

Darwin ~ Linux
OS X ~ $desktop_linux_distro

Sure you can say the iPhone runs OS X by defining "OS X" comfortably, but it really doesn't hold if you use "OS X" to mean what most people associate it with.

Re:OS /= GUI

[krischik]

Sure, I won't disagree here. But then $desktop_linux_distro != $mobile_phone_linux_distro as well and yet some users will say there phone runs Linux.

Re:AH, what about memory?

[Eunuchswear]

The real question is why they are using PearPC to emulate the PowerPC architecture? Wouldn't an x86 version of OS X be easier to get up and running, and maybe even approach something usable?

why would emulating the crazy x86 architecture be easier than a nice, simple RISC processor?

Or did you think the N900 uses an Intel processor? No, it's an ARM.