Darwin, Fink Updates

BSDForums writes "The Darwin team is pleased to announce the availability of the Darwin 7.0.1 Installer CD. This is a single Installer CD that will boot and install Darwin on Macintosh computers supported by Mac OS X 10.3, as well as certain x86-based personal computers. The version of Darwin installed by this CD corresponds to the open source core of Mac OS X 10.3. Check out the release notes for more information." dmalloc writes "The Fink team has announced that their binary distribution versioned 0.6.2 is ready for use now. It is a bug-fix release to alleviate issues that came up in 0.6.1. Along with the bug fixes, it introduces an enhanced package manager which is now capable of using the finkmirrors.net-supplied rsync and distfiles mirrors."

Re:x86?!

[kayen_telva]

opendarwin [opendarwin.org]

Re:????hmmm???

[ZackSchil]

Like a computer running a command line version of Linux or Unix with no GUI. Hold down command-option-s while your Mac is restarting to get a good idea. You'll notice what's different

Re:x86?!

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenDarwin.org maintains a database of x86 hardware that has been successfully used with Darwin.

http://opendarwin.org/hardware/ [opendarwin.org]

Re:Impact for Panther/Jaguar users?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK the opendarwin release cannot be installed over the top of Panther. You will get all the benefits when Apple release 10.3.2 in the next few weeks so don't worry too much about it at the moment.

Re:I've been using fink 0.6.2 for a few days

[jpkunst]

Try installing the X11 SDK from the Panther Xcode CD. I installed the X11 SDK and Fink 0.6.2 (in that order) and I haven't been asked by Fink to install XFree86.

JP

Re:I've been using fink 0.6.2 for a few days

[dimator]

There is a FAQ [sourceforge.net] about this, I don't know if you tried it, or if it applies to 0.6.2, but it worked for me a couple weeks ago.

Re:Impact for Panther/Jaguar users?

[WatertonMan]

I don't think you can do this. Almost certainly things would break. Wait for Apple. They'll have it out shortly. (I'm actually surprised Darwin updates are coming out before the OSX update - isn't it usually the other way around?)

BTW - one place Darwin is interesting is in competition for PPC Linux. If you just have a server then you have a lot more consistency if you install Darwin rather than Linux. Further you can test a lot of things on your OSX box. Had I an old 300 MHz or slower Mac around I'd probably install Darwin/X11 on it and then control it from my OSX box. It'd make a good NAT server, file server or so forth.

One problem I have on my OSX box are various searches that run as cron tasks. (Mainly downloading episodes of 24 and Smallville) However when I start up my Mac it is slow at getting the threads prioritized properly. Thus it is about 2 minutes before it feels "normal." If I offloaded all those perl scripts to a separate box that wouldn't be an issue.

Re:x86

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because the non-Darwin part of OS X is only available (publically) compiled. Compilation is the process of converting processor-independent high-level-language code to a lower level, in this case processor-type specific, form.

In order to get the non-Darwin part to run on x86, you'd need the source code to it so you can recompile for the Intel architecture. Apple's not likely to give that out any time soon.