I quit

[Shane Ambler]

On 10/1/05 7:03 PM, "Scott Bennett" <bennett at cs.niu.edu> wrote:

> But even so, much of FreeBSD came directly from 4.[34]BSD anyway.  I've
> glanced at a few of the header files in Mac OSX libraries, and they are
> still chock full of labels beginning with "NS" or "NX". :-)
> 
All the NS.. object names are from the OOP and didn't get renamed when apple
took over - I guess apple didn't want to give the NeXT developers the extra
work in updating their software.
This only relates to the cocoa based gui programs. The cli software uses the
bsd(based) libs and is mostly taken from FreeBSD now.
I have heard that most of the darwin committers are also FreeBSD committers.

>> BSD tradition Apple freely picked from here and there, whatever they
>> thought best, and made what can only be said to be their own.
> 
>    Keep in mind that Mach 2.x *was* a heavily modified 4.3BSD kernel.
> Mach 3.x and later is not.
You may be interested that according to Apple they are ditching the Mach
kernel. From 10.4 - due for release in the next 6 months they are using a
kernel based on FreeBSD 5 - with ACL's etc.
That's the way I read it anyway - they don't refer to the new kernel as Mach
based anymore.
See - apple.com/macosx/tiger/unix.html

>>>> applications you need.  I talked my 11 year old nephew through an
>>>> operating system upgrade (clean installation) of his ibook over the
>>>> phone -- including wireless networking with WEP.
>>>> 
>>>      Unfortunately, Apple has not released a version for Intel
>>> processors,
>>> so it won't help someone with a pee cee instead of a Mac.
>> 
>> Wrong, its called Darwin. If you think FreeBSD is raw then go play with
>> Darwin for a bit. Darwin is used for both i386 and PowerPC. MacOS X is
>> Darwin plus the fantastic Apple GUI and other neat Apple stuff.
>> 
>    I see.  So is it just the GUI that's missing in Darwin?  Or is the
> entire OOPS missing?  I guess it's nice to know that the underlying system
> is available for the pee cee architecture, but it couldn't be nearly as fun
> without the OOPS. :-)
> 
Yes the OOP you refer to - now called cocoa, previously NeXTStep/Openstep -
is part of the GUI. Actually it is broken into two parts - appkit and
foundation - foundation is unrelated to the gui providing data structs
(NSString, NSArray etc) the appkit contains NSWindow, NSButton, NSCheckbox
etc that is integral to the gui. But it is all bundled together with the
window server into what Apple calls 'cocoa' and sells only with Mac OS X.

You can try gnu-darwin.org - this is a ppc/x86 darwin distro with X-windows
etc.

Out of interest - it was microsoft that stopped Mac OS X for intel being
released. Many don't remember or just don't discuss - when apple bought out
NeXT - it was running on intel hardware and the first developer release of
OS X included an intel version - then came the publicity deal between MS and
Apple - MS agreed to continue development of office for mac and bought
$150000 in Apple stock and Apple agreed to drop all the lawsuits against MS.

The intel version has never been heard of since.

The fact that they maintain the intel version of darwin means they can
release an intel version at any time. The structure is in place to have
current software recompile for different processors and even include
multiple cpu binaries in the one application distribution.

But then maybe they want their bases open so they can change their hardware
to intel - they fell out with motorola and now get the G5's from IBM. And
there have been times before OS X when they looked at getting the Mac OS
running on intel hardware - it was between intel and motorola before they
changed to the RISC based PPC.


-- 

Shane Ambler
Sales Department
007Marketing.com
Shane at 007Marketing.com