Intel Mac experiences

Scott Sipe cscotts at mindspring.com
Fri May 26 00:14:37 PDT 2006


On May 26, 2006, at 1:36 AM, vayu wrote:

>
> On May 25, 2006, at 9:13 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
>>
>> James, you missed the point.  If you have an Intel MAC it came
>> with MacOS X (tiger) and that is basically the same operating
>> system as FreeBSD.  Meaning, what are you trying to gain?  If
>> anything, your worse off with FreeBSD since MacOS X comes with
>> a gorgeous user interface that FreeBSD does not have.
>>
>> Ted
>
>
> I can understand the desire.  OS X does have a polished and  
> beautiful desktop environment, but it is not FreeBSD.  If money  
> were no object for me, I would want a Macbook Pro with a triple  
> boot of OS X, Win XP and FreeBSD.
>
> Back to the original topic: James, I'm curious that you had any  
> results booting with any BSD or Linux.  The Intel Macs have no  
> BIOS,  I have read of hacks that got Linux (and Windows before  
> Apple offered it) to work, but it didn't seem straight forward  
> based on the accounts I read.

This is not true--how do you think Bootcamp works? It provides BIOS  
emulation for booting windows, and whatever else.

Secondly, why do people keep saying that OSX and FreeBSD are  
"basically the same operating system" -- if by basically the same you  
mean have a unix base, then sure. OSX runs on a hybrid mach  
microkernel (and with all the performance baggage this comes with). A  
great deal of the userland utilities originate from NetBSD or even  
OpenBSD in addition to FreeBSD. There is no ports system (sure,  
darwinports is similiar, though far less extensive). Boot system is  
entirely different. There's no way to buildworld or buildkernel, etc.  
Directory services are done completely differently than in Freebsd  
(netinfo?). There's not even an /etc/fstab. One could go on...

Scott


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