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:????hmmm???

[baka_boy]

Have you used a normal BSD installation? Think console/shell at startup (nice full-screen framebuffer-based one, though, at least on PPC), and XWindows for your choice of desktop environments.

Of course, you've got effectively the NeXTStep/OpenStep/OS X system environment, which means Frameworks, NetInfo, etc., are all in there, along with a Mach-based kernel-land environment, which is fairly opaque at the user level.

Darwin is a great project

[Anonymous Coward]

I really think that it has potential, if more people would take an interest in it. Mach/FreeBSD based kernel, FreeBSD userland, your choice of Netinfo or regular /etc, an OpenStep API, and full source code. I mean really, this thing kicks ass!

The only one issue that I have with it is it's lack of x86 drivers, which is not a fault of Darwin itself. If it supported my hardware, I'd run it exclusively, as every experience that I've had with it on PPC hardware has been nice...

Re:Impact for Panther/Jaguar users?

[mrgeometry]

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that Darwin is kind of like the thing running "under" Jaguar or Panther.

Roughly, Darwin is the underlying part of the operating system; the rest of Jaguar/Panther is mostly user interface stuff. This is what Apple charges money for---Darwin they give away, and the user interface part is $129 (per year :-) ).

So you wouldn't install Darwin if you already have Jag or Panther. Only if you have another computer that you want to set up with a free OS (and you don't mind installing user interface stuff like X windows), or maybe if you want to set up a "dual boot" thing on a single computer. I could imagine this latter setup being useful for testing, or for servers (normally don't need GUI, but every now and then reboot into GUI?).

Presumably every update that's made to Darwin is also released for Jaguar/Panther via Software Update. At least, I hope so. (Insert here standard comment about Apple being taken seriously in Enterprise.)

zach