Darling: Run Apple OS X Binaries On Linux

An anonymous reader writes "After having Wine to run Windows binaries on Linux, there is now the Darling Project that allows users to run unmodified Apple OS X binaries on Linux. The project builds upon GNUstep and has built the various frameworks/libraries to be binary compatible with OSX/Darwin. The project is still being worked on as part of an academic thesis but is already running basic OS X programs."

Comments

How long before...

[rbprbp]

... Apple finds a loophole and sues this developer into oblivion?

Re:How long before...

[squiggleslash]

Companies don't just sue people for no reason. For Apple to sue Darling, there'd have to be some kind of motivation for them to do so. Otherwise it would:

1. Waste a lot of money.
2. Cause a lot of ill-feeling
3. Possibly set precedents that bind it in future in a way damaging to Apple in the long term.

It's hard to see what kind of threat this product would be to Apple, and in theory it might even be a benefit.

Apple's market is based upon people liking the way Apple's devices work. With a small number of famous exceptions, few people buy Apple because of the exclusive availability of a particular piece of software. By and large, the vast majority of people interested in Apple's products aren't going to be interested in Ubuntu with a software compatibility layer. Of the few left who need a Mac for a particular piece of professional software, few are going to risk running that software on an unsupported compatibility layer.

I find it very improbable Apple will sue. I think they'll ignore it.

Re:Does it run PPC binaries?

[perpenso]

no? damn

Well, neither does the current Mac OS X. So it is fully compatible in that regard.

Re:Does it run PPC binaries?

[LubosD]

(I am the author of Darling.) And you're correct. Supporting PPC is on my TODO list and will not be that difficult I'll just have to port the few assembly routines.

The solution to the Linux email clients question

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess if we can run Mail.app the issue of crappy email clients on Linux is solved.

Re:Cue Apple's lawyers

[Guy Harris]

I'm not saying that's the issue both both applications you mentioned use GTK so maybe that's one reason why it works but may not work in other cases.

And GNU/Linux isn't all GTK.

"All GTK" may be sufficient to make cut/copy/paste work between applications, but it's not necessary. I just did a quick Wireshark build (to get a GTK+ application) on my Fedora-16-with-KDE-4 (virtual) machine, and was able to cut with ^X or copy with ^C from the Wireshark filter text box and paste with ^V into the app launcher Search text box and KWord, and cut or copy from either of the latter and paste it into the Wireshark filter text box.

So it works at least between those versions of GTK+ 2.x and Qt 4.x. There's no guarantee it will work between toolkits A and B for arbitrary values of A and B, but if a toolkit implements cut/copy/paste as per the freedesktop.org clipboard consensus - as that page notes, Qt and GTK+ both do - cut/copy/paste should work between applications using that toolkit and other applications using that toolkit and other toolkits that implement cut/copy/paste as per that consensus. (According to the page on that consensus, Qt 2 and GNU Emacs 20 didn't implement cut/copy/paste as per that consensus, but Qt 3 and GNU Emacs 21 would.)

None of that, BTW, gets rid of paste-current-selection, i.e. the action usually bound to the middle mouse button on many UN*X GUIs.

(Note, BTW, that the X11 term "selection" doesn't necessarily mean "what you've selected in the application"; that's the PRIMARY selection, but there's also the CLIPBOARD selection, which is whatever you've cut or copied, and the SECONDARY selection, which is probably unused unless you're using an XView application.)

Re:But

[eyegor]

OS X is a capable OS, but best used as a workstation at best. Deploying large numbers of OS X servers is greatly complicated by the fact that even Apple acknowledges that there's no market for their server grade systems and they've stopped selling them. Even if I put a Mac Pro into production, they'd be so expensive and occupy so much room that they'd fill the data center. If I stick a Mac Pro sideways in a rack, it takes 4 or 5U at least for 12 cores. I can put 4 dual hex or octo core Xeon rack mount servers in the same space or even some dual 16 core opteron servers. If I choose to use blades, I can put 16 HP 460c blades in 10U.

Don't even mention the Mac Mini as a viable server platform, it's an underpowered joke of a system if you want to do real work on it for sustained periods of time. They're not intended for, nor will they stand up to the kind of loads you see in the enterprise.

I work in the IT industry running computational clusters and lots of other kinds of servers. My rock is pretty large, but I'm on the top of it.

I do have a couple of OS X servers in the enterprise, but they're only there to run Open Directory to manage our Mac workstations.

your assertion that windows 7 or OS X is better than a Linux server shows how out of touch you are with enterprise computing. We have some windows 2003 and 2008 servers in production, but they're there to provide infrastructure for the windows workstations. No one tries to do anything else with them since it's far easier to deploy services on Linux.

As I mentioned, I love apples workstations and laptops but they don't make an appropriate platform for running any meaningful services in the enterprise.

Debunking Wine Myths

[tuppe666]

Enjoy your one frame per second!

I believe in proper ports, using cross-platform tools. In fact with Windows is becoming just another platform. Its simply less of an issue, but to suggest Wine is slower when its often faster is really strange.

http://wiki.winehq.org/Debunking_Wine_Myths

I've given you a link to show how misinformed you are. I suggest you spend a little time getting informed

Re:What about the rest of the APIs?

[cr_nucleus]

You mean a project that just started with a single guy isn't complete or near completion ?

Yeah it's gonna be tough but it doesn't mean it can't be useful or grow much bigger than it is now (rember this thing called Linux ?).