Intel Mac experiences

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

On May 26, 2006, at 7:54 AM, John Cruz wrote:

> When it comes right down to it, the differences between freeBSD and  
> MacOS X (darwin) are very minimal. No, you can't do a buildworld  
> because you can't build the kernel source because the source is  
> closed. But why would you need to? The kernel is already built and  
> optomized for your Mac hardware. As you stated, the kernels are  
> different anyways. No ports system, but when you have a plethora of  
> point-click-install software the need isn't really there.But basic  
> OS functioning is the same, they all (all the BSDs and MacOS) are  
> basically the same at the os level, but not the kernel level. Also,  
> i'm pretty sure that /etc/fstab/ exists on OS X

This is not true.  There are very big differences on how you admin  
and run them.  I have been running FBSD for 10 years or longer and  
have been running OS X since the public beta and the NeXT OSes and  
the Apple/NeXT hybrids that came in between, before OS X.  OS X is  
much different from an  admin perspective, both client and server  
versions.   Things you would do in FreeBSD you don't do on OS X and  
vice versa.  As an example, lots of standard unix like config files  
seem to exist on OS X but when you look at them they are empty or  
full of comments only and you learn that the data is actually taken  
out of netinfo.

OS X has very little to do with FreeBSD (different kernel, different  
driver architecture, different "admin" style and setup and files,  
different file structure, even in most cases a different file system  
type) EXCEP that Apple implemented a kernel layer that makes it look  
like a FBSD kernel so that userland utilities could be easily ported  
for the BSD subsystem (which is optional on OS X) and they took the  
FreeBSD userland as a base for their BSD subsystem userland.  There  
are probably other minor sharings of code etc and some things have  
been shared for MSDOS and other FS compatibilities etc.

Ted (not in the post above) claimed that OS X is a commercialized  
FreeBSD.    This is not true.  (Unless you want to say that  FreeBSD  
is a Linux distribution because they share the gnu compilers and many  
other gnu tools and programs.) And OS X is "run" much differently  
than FreeBSD.  OS X is a *nix-like OS and has a BSD subsystem so you  
can port normal non-X unix apps easily and if you install the  
optional Apple X11 then X apps can pretty easily be ported.  As a  
user at a shell prompt you won't find much difference (and you won't  
find that difference on OpenBSD, NetBSD, or even  Linux, and to a  
great extent with Solaris etc).  But from an admin perspective, from  
"running" the system, they are worlds, and I mean worlds, apart.

Luckily for simple things like running make files etc (once you have  
appropriate tools installed) they are close, like any "unix" is close.

Chad

---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
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