Darling: Run Apple OS X Binaries On Linux 255
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."
Re:Does it run PPC binaries? (Score:3, Interesting)
apt-get install qemu
I have a hunch Darling would need some extra beating, but it's no different from wine on ARM.
Android Store just more useful (Score:5, Interesting)
Darling could mean eventually running the entire contents of Cydia on Android
The days of iExclusivity have long passed, anything of value is already on both platforms, or that Android passed iOS both in number of Apps and Downloads in October [700,000 ans 25,000,000,000 respectively]. Although I believe that iOS should have always allowed 3rd party stores, and people should be allowed to move cross-platform programs...between platforms. I do think this unnecessary lock-in needs to be stopped.
Although me personally I have more interest in running my Android Apps on my touch-screen Linux Desktop.
Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:wine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: windows vs Mac, I personally hate using windows as a workstation, but I have one at home for gaming. In general, it's a crufty clunky dog's breakfast of an OS that's a pain in the butt to configure and update. I've used nearly every version of DOS or Windows since the days of DOS 2.0 and Windows 2.0, so I'm familiar with its flaws and foibles. The only versions I've never used are Vista and Win 8.
MacOS used to be a crap OS. It was pretty, but didn't multitask at all and crashed far too often to trust. OS/2 was nice, but fragile and was never as popular as Windows. OS X is an awesome OS for workstations and is excellent to work with for day-to-day stuff. The only Linux I use for workstation stuff is Ubuntu. CentOS as a workstation OS is ok, but is too much of a pain to deal with for stuff like sound cards, etc.
Slashdot has a lot of different kinds of people on it. Many of them hobbyists and people who work in small *nix shops. Many are also enterprise IT types and the most popular enterprise *nix is Linux, hands down. Redhat/CentOS flavors dominate, but there are a few debian shops as well, such as Akamai.
A lot of that stuff is just holy wars, but if you look at what vendors support what OS's, You don't typically see much for BSD. Our company recently retired a BSD cluster and are in the process of decommissioning our BSD-based servers for a myriad of reasons. Juniper may use BSD in their stuff, but many more use Linux as their embedded OS.
BSD is popular with some companies and in colleges, but when you get into the real world it's either Linux or Solaris and Solaris is fading fast. Look at the job market. Linux is what most companies are looking for. I'm not dissing BSD, but I'd never recommend it for anything in the enterprise.
I used to run some SunOS (bsd-flavored) systems 'back in the day' and loved them, but when Solaris came out, pretty much everyone switched. I've used Solaris 2.5 - Solaris 10 on both SPARC and X86 and have watched it decline over the years in popularity because of hardware costs and X86 compatibility issues. Oracle has made some really dumb moves over the years regarding the stuff they purchased as part of Sun and most admins I know have given up on their stuff.
NetBSD attempted this a decade ago (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a similar [slashdot.org]attempt [onlamp.com]in NetBSD almost 10 years ago. .
That prehistoric project implemented Mach-O loader, Mach system calls, and has been able to start OS X display server. It felt short actually displaying something useful, and died from lack of user interest.
Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
Your rock however must be small indeed because BSD is certainly "mainstream", as has been discussed on /. ad nauseam.
I don't know how accurate the stats are, but w3techs puts FreeBSD at 1.1% of all web servers [w3techs.com], that's roughly as mainstream as Linux is on the desktop - in other words not at all. It used to big be yes, but my impression is that Linux got corporate backing and raised the quality significantly while BSD remained a mostly amateur project. Particularly they were rather late with production grade SMP support which started a lot of migration to Linux and while a lot of web hosting companies used it in-house and small companies offered support there never formed a big professional support organization like Red Hat was for Linux. Not to mention Linus has by some small miracle managed to keep it together under one banner instead of forking into three branches with duplication of effort.