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."
How long before... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... Apple finds a loophole and sues this developer into oblivion?
...if only there was a similar situation we could use to predict how it might go.
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...if only there was a similar situation we could use to predict how it might go.
... It depends on who has enough money to spare. Apple certainly has ...
And Microsoft did not when Wine got started?
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> Microsoft were not as flagrantly greedy and evil then as Apple are now.
Two words rebuttal: dr dos
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Is it necessary? Wine started out life in 1993 and didn't release a stable version until 2008 - and even now requires a whacking great software compatibility list.
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I know the summary says OS X, but this is just loading Darwin binaries. You know, Darwin, the BSD-based OS that Apple voluntarily open-sourced? I know Apple have a reputation as the next evil empire, but I think suing people for doing things that they specifically enabled with an open-source release is a bit unlikely.
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It also really depends on what Apple would sue for? I mean, if you're running an OS X binary that ships with OS X, like say, iTunes or something, OK, Apple might have a reason to sue. But if y
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I find it very improbable Apple will sue. I think they'll ignore it.
You deserve to be mod'ed up. When a similar project [onlamp.com] passed some milestones on NetBSD, there was not even a cease and desist letter which would certainly have been seen as acknowledgement
Re:How long before... (Score:4, Funny)
You leave Apple alone! They worked hard to design a rectangular LCD display for the Mac, and totally deserve their patents. If your laptop has a rectangular LCD and you're running Linux, you're just a cheapskate who's stopping progress and giving Steve Jobs an ulcer. He died because of you, you know!
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The developer, a university student?
It would be far cheaper to give said developer an intern job at Apple than the fee Apple's lawyers charge.
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Re:The developer should leave the US immediately. (Score:4, Informative)
I suspect he'd have to go to the US in order to be able to leave the US [dolezel.info].
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The overpriced WASP country club mentality helps build a certain mystique around Apple products.Understandably, people are curious about what all the hubbub is and equally understandably aren't really interested in paying the minimum $700 fee for a proper test drive.
Without some other compelling reason to buy a Mac product, of course people will be interested in running it in emulation to see what all of the mindless hype is about.
As someone that's "been there and done that", I can certainly see where the "
Soooo... (Score:3)
Seriously though, if this is going anywhere near wine, we'd have the best of three worlds on one platform.
Cue Apple's lawyers (Score:2)
will I finally be able to cut & paste across applications? *ducks*
If you're referring to some imagined deficiency of the GNU/Linux operating environment, then explain how I just copied and pasted your comment from Firefox to Leafpad [freeshell.org], composed the reply in Leafpad, and copied and pasted it back to Firefox, all on Xubuntu 12.04. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V work just as easily to move text around between applications in GNU/Linux as in Windows.
Seriously though, if this is going anywhere near wine, we'd have the best of three worlds on one platform.
Cue Apple's lawyers scrambling to find a way around the ruling of API uncopyrightability in Oracle v. Google.
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Re:Cue Apple's lawyers (Score:5, Informative)
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 [freedesktop.org] - 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 [freedesktop.org], 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.)
If Wine supports clipboard, Darling can too (Score:4, Informative)
In any case, I opened the first PDF that I found in ~/Downloads, copied a paragraph, and successfully pasted it into Leafpad. So copying from Evince to Leafpad worked. Then I did wine notepad.exe and pasted the same paragraph from Evince into Wine Notepad. To finish proving the point, I even typed this very sentence into Wine Notepad and copied and pasted it into Firefox. So if they managed to get the clipboard working between GTK+ and Wine, I don't see the big obstacle to getting it working between GTK+ and Darling.
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Cheer up, just kidding
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I already have that.. it's called VMWare Fusion on a Macbook Pro. =^)
That's a little different, but if somebody were to make a package to let you run Linux binaries on OS X (including hacking the execsw[] table in xnu/bsd/kern/kern_exec.c [apple.com] to have an image activator for ELF binaries) and combine it with Wine for OS X [winehq.org], that's another alternative along the lines of Wine+Darling-on-Linux. (Extra credit for hacking execsw[] to handle PE binaries as well. :-))
I don't know how much Windows NT source would be needed to complete the circle and add the ability to run OS X and Linu
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I think you're correct, technically. To hear things from Microsoft's point of view, a full retail copy of Windows XP Pro or 7 was required to run as a VM on a Mac.
An OEM license of Windows is only intended for use with the 1 new PC you purchased it with as a bundle.
On the other hand, I don't think the license specifically made any distinction that the new PC you purchased in a "bundle" with the OEM copy of Windows could NOT be a Mac? So you could probably buy a new Mac at a retailer like Micro Center and
Must be preinstalled (Score:3)
On the other hand, I don't think the license specifically made any distinction that the new PC you purchased in a "bundle" with the OEM copy of Windows could NOT be a Mac?
Because Apple doesn't sell bundles of Mac hardware and Windows OS.
So you could probably buy a new Mac at a retailer like Micro Center and buy an OEM version of Windows 7 at the same time, for use with that Mac, and run it in a VM legally.
As I understand the Windows license prior to PULSB, Micro Center would have had to install Windows into Boot Camp or VirtualBox or VMware before selling the Mac. I don't know if Apple allows its authorized resellers to do that. Unfortunately, I can't really look further because after PULSB, the old "Windows Licensing for Hobbyists" page on Microsoft's site appears to be 404.
How the heck is Microsoft going to know if that OEM copy of Windows 7 you possess and loaded on your Mac was actually purchased originally with said Mac
I don't know whether Microsoft actually does this, but the Windows pr
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As I understand the Windows license prior to PULSB, Micro Center would have had to install Windows into Boot Camp or VirtualBox or VMware before selling the Mac. I don't know if Apple allows its authorized resellers to do that.
As an employee of a Value Added Authorized Reseller, we can do that at my company. In fact, we don't sell any laptops other than Mac laptops as they are best suited for our purpose and our industry. Of course there are Windows user in our industry, and for that we route them to either a PC custom built by us, or a MacBook Pro that we've preinstalled BootCamp, Windows, and a suite of apps on. Posting anon to avoid killing mods I've made.
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Maybe he's running Linux in Fusion. With Wine even.
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This is illegal, you know (Score:2)
VMWare Fusion 3 and earlier worked with OEM [Windows install] disks.
But doing this was probably as illegal as a Hackintosh. Apple v. Psystar.
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what OS X application is worth running on Linux?
In my case, one example: Photoshop with a Wacom tablet.
And no, I'm not going to invest hours or even days to find drivers etc. for a workaround.
I doubt Darling will provide that either, but one still can hope. Anyway, I'm sure other will find more (and better) examples.
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There are Wacom tablet drivers in the Linux Kernel and Photoshop works great under WINE. Surely it should "Just Work" on a properly compiled & configured kernel/userland?
This is a sincere question.
I use Photoshop CS (v9? - also tried CS4 trial and it worked pretty good, but my workstation is too old it ran really slow) under WINE all the time but I have never used a Wacom tablet. My brother has one so I am sure I could try it, but I know I specifically stripped out Wacom drivers from my kernel when I up
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Surely it should "Just Work" ...
since you asked, I'll try to give a sincere answer.
Point is, I won't be of much help here. I have an environment that works. That is MacOS with drivers supported by Wacom. I prefer Linux for other tasks, but that's not the issue here.
You mention "properly compiled & configured" kernals... Do I bother? No.
Do I want to invest hours of my time trying to accomplish something I already have? No.
As someone pointed out, the Win version of PS is better now than the Mac version (used to be opposite). If I nee
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I know a lot of people who get a real kick out of Garage Band, iMovie, and iDVD. Delicious Library is pretty neat. The Mac version of iTunes is much less sucktastic than the Windows version. (It still blows, though. And I say that as a Mac user.)
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what OS X application is worth running on Linux?
Some OSX aficionados really like Pixelmator, a photo editing program which is an alternative to Photoshop. I haven't used it myself so I can't say whether it would be worth it or not.
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Some OSX aficionados really like Pixelmator, a photo editing program which is an alternative to Photoshop. I haven't used it myself so I can't say whether it would be worth it or not.
Pixelmator is a very nice 70% Photoshop replacement that is much, much faster and takes advantage of OS X specific features. That said, it also uses a lot of the graphic libraries that probably are going to be the hardest thing for Darling to get working.
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I want to be able to run ComicLife without being tied to my ageing mac mini. The win32 port does not work in WINE (which is amusing because Skyrim, Portal, Thief, SONAR etc work fine), and I can find no linux-based alternatives to it since it's very much a niche product.
Sometimes I've pondered writing my own, but there are too many things I don't know how to do properly or lack the artistry for, like smooth image scaling, vector speech bubbles or the text flowing engine.
What about the rest of the APIs? (Score:4, Informative)
This is nifty in all, but all their example application is doing is literally the graphical equivalent of "hello world".
GNUStep still only implements maybe 30% of the Apple APIs out there. And they still don't do them 100% the same way- see NSDecimalNumber for reference (Apple has a really stupid whacked way of doing it, GNUStep's implementation is slightly more sane- but they still shouldn't be straying from what Apple does if they want a compatible API in the end). Things like Core Animation, Core Graphics, Core Image, etc... Forget about it. The GNUStep guys have barely even bothered to look at that stuff, let alone implementing it.
Sadly, there is a lot more to a modern day Macintosh application then your standard NS/CF classes (even though Core Foundation is kinda opensource). You're not going to see Tweetbot or Cornerstone or Coda 2 running on anything other then OS X for a very, very long time. iOS might be a bit different since the majority of UIKit is very well understood (and there are various other APIs out there designed to re-implement it), so basic iOS applications could probably run with little effort- but for anything using APIs outside of UIKit (again, Core Animation, Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core MIDI, so on and so forth)- nobody has really spent any time on understanding how those work and re-implementing them elsewhere, and a lot of apps hook into this stuff to give you the nifty iOS experience that other handhelds can't.
In other words, the biggest barrier to this project isn't running OS X binaries on Linux. That's easy. It's implementing the other 70% of the stuff that nobody has even remotely begun to poke at. The OS X API library is vast and expansive, and GNUStep has done a good job replicating what we had on NeXTSTEP in the 1990s- but they've got absolutely none of the modern OS X stuff.
Re:What about the rest of the APIs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ?).
The solution to the Linux email clients question (Score:5, Funny)
I guess if we can run Mail.app the issue of crappy email clients on Linux is solved.
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even more awesome, we can now run Outlook for Mac on Linux! standard at my work, it sucks even worse and harder than outlook on windows
Re:The solution to the Linux email clients questio (Score:4, Informative)
it sucks even worse and harder than outlook on windows
Clearly you have not had Notes inflicted on you, if you had you would cling to Outlook with all your heart and count your lucky stars.
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KMail? (Score:2)
The only E-Mail program so far which actually is so slow it cannot keep up with my typing!
Here is my take on that (Score:2)
Steam (Score:3, Funny)
Apple's compiler wold be nice (cross-compiling) (Score:2)
A few years ago I regularly built Qt-based binaries on my Linux machine, targeting PPC OS X (10.3). It was pretty slick. I tried to set up a cross-compiling environment later under 10.4 fat binary days, but that proved too difficult, sadly. As it stands now, if I could run apple's native compiler and tools under linux, outputting nice OS X app bundles for Qt apps, that would be pretty slick.
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A few years ago I regularly built Qt-based binaries on my Linux machine, targeting PPC OS X (10.3). It was pretty slick. I tried to set up a cross-compiling environment later under 10.4 fat binary days, but that proved too difficult, sadly. As it stands now, if I could run apple's native compiler and tools under linux, outputting nice OS X app bundles for Qt apps, that would be pretty slick.
Start here [apple.com].
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Haha. Nice try. That's how I used to do it. Source code available != portable to Linux easily. These days, it's much harder, but is doable, at least for 10.6-compatible binaries: https://github.com/Tatsh/xchain/ [github.com]
Wine still not supported as a 64-bit slackbuild. (Score:2)
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It works properly for me on Ubuntu 12.10. I can run Steam, even (Well, I'm not in the beta... and since I had HL2 anyway I went ahead and picked up the THQ bundle, for basically nothing. I gave some money to charity and to the bundlers for administration.)
It was all bad in 12.04, I couldn't install it and lsb-base at the same time
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.
Dine (Score:5, Funny)
This might actually be easier than WINE (Score:3)
I could be wrong, but I suspect implementing the OSX APIs in Linux might actually be easier than trying to implement Win32. Partly this is because OSX is already a *nix-based system, so you don't have to do as many weird hacks with directory mapping and so forth. But mostly I think it may be simpler because Apple has relatively clean APIs and relentlessly deprecates legacy stuff. When you implement Win32, you have to implement literally thousands (if not millions) of hacks and special cases going back to the 1980s. This is not without justification as a design goal – backward compatibility is one of the reasons why Windows has had such staying power in business – but it's difficult for even Microsoft to get the whole edifice running smoothly, much less third parties with no access to internal design documents and source code. In contrast, when Apple switched from Carbon to Cocoa, they were pretty aggressive about deprecating the old framework.
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I could be wrong, but I suspect implementing the OSX APIs in Linux might actually be easier than trying to implement Win32. Partly this is because OSX is already a *nix-based system, so you don't have to do as many weird hacks with directory mapping and so forth
OTOH you need to cope with Mach system calls. OS X is a bicephal kernel. There are positive system calls, which are handled by a BSD-derived kernel, and negative system calls, which are handled by the Mach microkernel.
The Mach microkernel is central to OS X functionality as all process IPC go through Mach messages. And that stuff has nothing to do with Linux stuff
Isn't Apple OS"whatever" at its core, Linux based? (Score:2)
But as someone else said, is there anything to run?
Re:Isn't Apple OS"whatever" at its core, Linux bas (Score:5, Informative)
OSX is Darwin (A MACH micro kernel) with a BSD user land + OpenStep + a fuckton of proprietary Apple stuff. Nothing Linux about it.
You do know that Linux is just a kernel right? Son, these days Solars has more in common with Linux than OSX does.
Wake me with all of CoreFoundation and AppKit, etc (Score:2)
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including CoreData and CoreGraphics equivalents are in place. Until then, it's like watching a drunk athlete play against all-stars, when comparing GNUstep(off a cliff) versus OS X.
Sure you don't want to stick around and taunt them as they wail into the night then drink their tears as the sun rises over the desolation that their lives have become?
Adobe Creative Suite not far down the road? (Score:3)
How good is Apple's documentation compared to Microsofts? This is important for a clean-room implementation.
Mace (Score:2)
It seems like this was a missed opportunity to name the project Mace.
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apt-get install qemu
I have a hunch Darling would need some extra beating, but it's no different from wine on ARM.
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Remember SheepShaver [cebix.net], and the like in PPC days?
With Intel as a common denominator since 05, I was always wondering why GNUStep hooks to run Cocoa apps weren't being developed.
Well, now I guess they are. I wish it'd have been done, back when I tinkered more. :-)
Re:Does it run PPC binaries? (Score:5, Informative)
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No it won't. (Score:2)
Re:Does it run PPC binaries? (Score:5, Funny)
no? damn
Well, neither does the current Mac OS X. So it is fully compatible in that regard.
Re:Does it run PPC binaries? (Score:5, Informative)
There's Mac-on-Linux for that, last updated in 2007:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac-on-Linux [wikipedia.org]
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yea well if I got to drag out the powermac to boot into linux ppc to run a mac emulator... whats the point
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It probably would on PPC Linux...
Cydroid (Score:5, Informative)
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.
DroidStep would make Play Store even more useful (Score:3)
Although I believe that iOS should have always allowed 3rd party stores, and people should be allowed to move cross-platform programs...between platforms.
A port of GNUstep to Android would let iOS application developers target Android with much less additional effort. It could help make a lot of currently App Store-exclusive applications into cross-platform applications.
Nothing to do with my post. (Score:2, Insightful)
A port of GNUstep to Android would let iOS application developers target Android with much less additional effort. It could help make a lot of currently App Store-exclusive applications into cross-platform applications.
...and this is backward thinking. Apple threw away market share protecting their profits, but we [by we I mean me and the ex-shareholders of Apple] are all in agreement that gravy chain is coming to an end. Apple need to step up, and support cross-platform development from the get go, otherwise they will find themselves marginalised [more] pretty quickly. I shouldn't have to reiterate...the days of iPhone exclusives are long over. You post would have maybe been relevant a year ago, but that is a long time a
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A port of GNUstep to Android would let iOS application developers target Android with much less additional effort.
There are already excellent tools for doing just that. You don't get much easier than Cordova or Unity. Darling seems like a fun project and could even be useful some day, but not really a practical solution to cross platform mobile development unless Google were to buy in in a really, really big way.
Re:DroidStep would make Play Store even more usefu (Score:4, Informative)
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I own both an S3 and an iPhone 5. I'm having a difficult time finding apps for the S3 that match what the apps I've grown to depend on in iOS. It's easy to quote statistics, but they don't tell me anything. I don't care if there's 700,000 apps if I can't find a good 100% replacement for an app like OmniFocus or Downcast. I've found a crapton of the same types of app on Android: a quick search on Google Play for "flashlight" returned 10,000 results (probably not all 10,000 are the same type of app, but searc
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Why would you want to run Cydia? Cydia is a cool stuff for iOS that Android has and often many times over. The advantage would be to run the hundreds of thousands of Apple app store apps on Android.
Xcode ... (Score:5, Informative)
Is there anything worth running?
Well the Xcode development environment is Mac OS X specific and unlikely to be ported to any other platform.
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
Because as good as OS X is, it's not a particularly good server platform and requires Mac hardware, while Linux has been around for ages, runs on commodity hardware, has a very well supported number of open source packages and is considered mainstream by most Unix admins.
As a server platform, OS X suffers from the same problem as Solaris. You need the vendor supplied hardware to get it to run well. Solaris is a dying OS because Sun and Oracle supplied hardware is too expensive and just isn't worth it when you can get three times the computing power for less money, and X86 Solaris is frankly crap, since it has such a small hardware compatibility list.
I don't mention BSD since it's not really mainstream any longer. It's a good OS, but lacks overall vendor support.
All that being said, I prefer OS X systems for my workstation and CentOS or Scientific Linux for servers. Redhat's nice, but overpriced when you need to deploy a lot of systems.
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I don't mention BSD since it's not really mainstream any longer. It's a good OS, but lacks overall vendor support.
Indeed, last BSD release was 4.4 [wikipedia.org], and it was in 1995. No vendor sells BSD anymore, and nobody use it, therefore you are perfectly right. But I do not know where you have been living for 13 years if you are not aware that BSD derived systems are everywhere today, and backed by major vendors.
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.
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and yeah, I'm well aware of CentOS' lineage. We chose it because it's essentially Red Hat, but doesn't have the hefty price tag.
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Apple was in fact the #3 storage vendor in the world when they discontinued the product
[Citation needed]
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The storage/server people who were ditched by Apple started their own company - Active Storage [getactivestorage.com]. I've got 600TB of it running in my shop so far and will add another 300-600TB next year. The NASCAR video facility in Charlotte, NC has many Petabytes of it and there are lots of other takers in the video post production world. They've tuned the storage to be friendly to continuous streams of 100GB single files, applications where I've seen EMC, HDS and DDS fall over on.
To the claim of being the #3 storage vendor
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Ok, when Apple ditched their USERS, Active Storage started up. Sort of a nuance. You know Alex? Smart guy. How about Emjay? One of the coolest support techs around.
Not to appear combative, but in which category was Apple the #3 supplier? That IDC document got pretty granular and I'm having a hard time finding some math that correlates that. Like in 2007, the "Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Terabytes Shipped by Supplier" chart says Apple shipped 67,500.3 TB while HP shipped almost 20x more at 1,299,213.7 TB.
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.
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.
Consider BSD components (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Even as a workstation product, you're probably better off virtualizing MacOS. That way you can take advantage of cheap and ugly PCs that run circles around a Mac for the same price as what Apple offers.
As a server product, Apple likely suffers from the same mental block that many companies and individuals do: the idea that a server is somehow something special and something that you need to pay $1000 for the OS just to get started.
Re: (Score:2)
If you have OSX already, why are you messing around with linux?
Presumably at least a part of the target audience for this project is people who don't have OSX, but would like the option to run OSX programs on a free operating system.
Re: (Score:3)
Like WINE, Darling would provide the capability without Apple's OSX files. From the article:
Darling must provide an ABI-compatible set of libraries/frameworks as those on OS X so it can parse the executable files for the Darwin kernel, load them into memory, and execute them without needing any code recompilation or other modifications for Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
I got mine from the Apple Store. Apple Corp used to sell such files rather freely actually. Although admittedly that approach likely won't last much longer.
NES viruses (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:wine (Score:4)
You sure about this? You can run even the latest and greatest Windows versions of Steam games via playonlinux, which is basically a wrapper for WINE. Things have improved greatly in the last year or two.
Re: (Score:2)
Debunking Wine Myths (Score:5, Informative)
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 [winehq.org]
I've given you a link to show how misinformed you are. I suggest you spend a little time getting informed
Re: (Score:2)
Skyrim on max settings at 60fps here bro.
I think your not paying attention!
Re:wine (Score:5, Informative)
Wine is working great these days. Steam, video games and even Netflix.
OS-X apps on PC-BSD? (Score:2)