Macintosh and Open Source, Part 2
By Lincoln D. Stein
In my last column, I discussed how open source has come to the Apple Macintosh via two routes. One is through the grass-roots Linux movement, which has resulted in several Linux distributions for Macintosh PowerPC systems. The other route is from within Apple itself, in the form of Darwin, a variant of BSD Unix that forms the core of the new Mac OS X.
As I reported last month, after borrowing a white and blue G4 Macintosh from a friend, I wiped its hard disk clean and installed Yellow Dog Linux on it. It was a bit shaggy, but basically a good animal. I was able to run all my favorite Linux applications on the G4, and was particularly impressed by Mac-on-Linux (MOL), a Mac OS emulator that can host Macintosh applications within an X window. Since then, I've also experimented with LinuxPPC, another commercial distribution. Installing this product was a much more pleasant experience, thanks to a well-designed installer application and a nice graphical disk-partitioning utility.
However, I'll spend most of this column talking about Darwin. Apple is promoting Darwin heavily as the basis for a new open source operating system, and it's doing all the right things to achieve that goal. The complete Darwin system is available in source-code form under a licensing agreement similar to the GPL. Darwin is available for download as one big compiled package for newbies, as individual tar files for those interested in upgrading, and as a publicly available CVS server for developers who want to work with the most current updates.
