On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 13:26:49 +1000 (EST)
Graeme Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I was reading an article in the April edition of Linux Journal the other
> day which looks into the current state of OSX. In it the comment is made:
>
> "After hackers barfed on Apples original public source licence, the
> company issued a new one that the Open Source Initiative soon approved"
>
> and
>
> " In fact, you don't even need to run Darwin on Apple hardware, since an
> x86 version is available as well (from Apple even)"
>
> I am wondering if any sluggers have tried installing GNU-Darwin and if so,
> what do they have to report?
Don't know anything about Darwin on x86 but I've had an iBook for a bit over
a week now and I feel I'm able to comment on the non x86 things.
My main purpose for getting an iBook was that I wanted a laptop with better
graphics that the one I had. The iBook had a three advantages over x86 laptops
in order of importance:
1) I could dual boot with MacOSX and make sure my software could compile
on OSX.
2) it wasn't x86
3) I could run some of the commercial OSX music software so I could compare
it with stuff available for Linux.
When I got it, the first thing I did was grab the Fink stuff from
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
which is a Debian style set of packages for OSX including an X server which
can coexist with the standard Aqua GUI, standard GNU tools (autoconf etc)
my favourite editor (nedit), cvs etc.
The developement angle was for me the most important aspect of OSX. In this,
it fails pretty badly. Complaints:
1) Extremely poor libtool/autoconf/automake support. Now you might say this
is not Apple's fault but I think it is. Apple has decided to do a number
of things in a completely non-standard Unix way. For instance I still
do not understand dynamic linking on OSX; there is no ldd program. Its
almost as if Apple is making it deliberately difficult to run Free
Software on OSX.
2) sed is broken (in comparison to GNU sed and seemingly more than other
unixen). The command line
sed s/some pattern with spaces/xxx/
fails because the Mac sed is not smart enough to realise that the spaces
are part of the pattern.
Other annoyances:
1) The Aqua GUI has no concept of multiple desktops. On a tiny laptop
screen this is really a pain.
2) The only way to set up networking stuff seems to be via the GUI and I
haven't found a way to fix this piece of weird-ness :
> nslookup one_of_my_local_machnes # works
> ping one_of_my_local_machnes # doesn't work
> ping one_of_my_local_machnes.my_local_domain # works
I'd know how to fix this on a standard Unix machine but I haven't been
able to fix it on the iBook. I'be tried to add a default lookup domain
in the GUI, but it doesn't want to allow anything that doesn't end in
.com. Painful.
3) The mv command does not allow the renaming of directories in place ie
mv old_dir_name new_name
I really can't understand why this hasn't been fixed.
4) Speed. With the Aqua GUI and X running it certainly ain't fast, even with
256Meg of RAM. As soon as I get around to installing Linux on it I'll have
something to compare it to.
Keep in mind this is the opinion of a Linux power user. The average person
would probably quite like the interface and the ease of use and thats what
Apple is aiming for. I just wish they didn't have such a Not-Invented-Here
attitude.
Erik
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Moore's Law: hardware speed doubles every 18 months
Gates' Law: software speed halves every 18 months
--
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More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
