Darwin

[Joel Rees]

> Supposedly FreeBSD is the basis for Darwin. 

Just one of those urban legends. ;-)

Lessee, if I wander over to 

    http://www.freebsd.org/

and look in the FAQ at

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/index.html

and browse through the introduction at

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/introduction.html

I find that there is a topic about the differences between the bsds:

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/introduction.html#DIFFERENCES-TO-OTHER-BSDS

and in that paragraph I find that there is a reference to a page that
talks about the bsd family tree,

    http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html

and if I read that page I discover that there is a little discussion of
Mac OS X and Darwin. Apparently, Darwin is derived from the Mach kernel
and from all the bsds in various proportions.

> Any idea why

Good question. Who started that rumor?  :-P

> since FreeBSD 
> does not have a PowerPC port?

Sure it does. Just not anywhere near as stable as freeBSD for Sparc or
alpha or i386.

Back at 

    http://www.freebsd.org/

I see that there are some hardware notes:

    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.1R/hardware.html

and in there I see there is a link below the list of platforms that have
released code, to platforms currently under development:

    http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/index.html

And in the list on that page:

    http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html

Hmm. Says it's on the verge on booting to single-user mode. But
following the links around some more to the mailing list archives shows
this message from Peter Grehan:

    ... The system has been able to run multi-user on a limited number
    of NewWorld models for a while, although installation is not pretty.

HTH

-- 
Joel Rees, programmer, Systems Group
Altech Corporation (Alpsgiken), Osaka, Japan
http://www.alpsgiken.co.jp