Apple updates Darwin, releases OpenPlay

A reader writes "Apple has made available a binary release of Darwin on its public source server. They also released the rest of the Darwin source code which should finally let it compile out of the box. On top of that Apple has published a third Open Source project dubbed OpenPlay. OpenPlay is a network abstraction layer designed to simplify the task of creating programs which communicate across multiple computers. "

Comments

Someone has installed it. Me.

[MrKai]

I grabbed it (the binary distrib) and installed it last night.

It is in fact BS4.4 over Mach3, wth Apple/NeXT's supplemental directory structure.

There was no GUI included...it runs in/as a shell.

If you've ever used NeXT/Openstep (or MacOS X 10) it will all look familiar to you.

Apparently, *this* core, Darwin 0.2, and not the one that MacOS X Server is currently running on top of, is what Mac OS X ("Client"), which was released as a Developer Preview yesterday at WWDC, is based on.

Apple has moved to egcs as well.

So, for all those that think Apple is full of Poopy-Doo Doo's, it's right there in front of ya'.

Apple is and will be building it's libraries (MacOS API, Java and Openstep/CoCo) on top of what's on that website...just like they said.

So as much as some of us like to rag on Apple, it appears to be w/o merit this time...they are doing what they said they would. And I don't see anyone else with a commercial OS even releasing a teensy bit of what makes it tick...

The kernel should be able to be brought up on a PC, but I need to have a closer look at whether or not they run the shell in character mode on a PC), or on a bitmapped screen like in the old Openstep. If it's on a bitmapped screen, there might be driver issues...

I suppose I could just ask them...Wilfredo Sanchez spends a lot of time on the dev list...

-K

hardware configurations?

[mcc]

macnn says that Darwin requires a G3.

but since it's open-source, you ought to be able to port it to any machine you want, be it low-end power mac or 486. i glanced through some of the early posts to the darwin-development mailing list, and quite a few of the people seemed to expect to be able to easily run it on an x86 machine.

actually, now that i think about it, what about this whole "mach" thing? Darwin and OS X use the mach microkernel to communicate with the hardware, right? doesn't this mean you could basically port the entire Darwin OS to a new architecture by finding an existing Mach kernel (such as the mklinux ones..) for that architecture and dumping the Darwin OS on top of that?

what i'm curious about is when, or whether, i'll get to run Darwin on this here PPC 7200/75.

really, i'm still waiting for a coherent, complete overview of Darwin (viewed as an operating system and not as an attempt to cash in on the current "hipness" of Open-Source) with, y'know, a description of what it's like, or a screenshot or something. Hell, i've yet to hear of a single case of someone installing darwin.

And since in order to install darwin before binaries you essentially had to have an existing *nix distribution to install it, i doubt anyone did install darwin. At least i assume you'd need *nix, i never saw any instructions on apple's site, just a bunch of random .tar.gz files listed in a difficult-to-download-all-at-once line on a web site. no FTP. (though i haven't checked there in awhile).

And i don't know what it's like now, since i have not been able to actually get into the Darwin sections of apple's web site at any point in the last 24 hours. The server does not respond. It may just be too busy; either way i can't get in.

So while i have tried to figure it out, i'm still completely in the dark about Darwin. Does anyone have any details about this system? Like, is there some sort of GUI, is it difficult to use or incomplete or instable? What file system does it use? Ext2? HFS+?

Has anyone actually seen this mysterious OS?