For serious geeks only - Mac on Linux

[Guest]

MS is not even 10th top investor in APPLE.

 

1.Lord Abbett & Co

2.FMR Corporation (Fidelity Management & Research Corp)

3.Private Capital Management, Inc.

4.Janus Capital Management, LLC

5.Barclays Bank Plc

..etc

 

 

[adikgede]

SCO would be in even more trouble than it is now.

mmm was SCO a Unix that anyone wanted to sell or support? IBM should just buy them out but maybe the price is to worked up now. Inspite of all the huff and puff its Novell that still owns a lot of the patents from what I gather. Isn't ironic that so many GNU/Linux people were gung ho when Caldera baught Dr DOS and decided to get litigious with MS. Now Caldera buys SCO and decides to get litigious with Linux. ha! tough luck for the Linux developers at Caldera Unix developers at SCO though. I imagine having tweeked bastards like that running the company is not good for creative enthusiasm. I'm just waiting to see if IBM ever has to resort to enforcing patents though, what a mess that will be.

 

I think that you have to be a real Mac zealot to want to compile gainst Apple's hybrid Unix. install FINK. everything goes in /sw so it wont walk on anything that apple has if you installed the developer tools. You just have to put /sw in your path and thats about it. I thought that tcsh was apples default shell, I don't remember I set it to bash within a week, what ever shell it was I remember that it was one that doesnt remember i.e. no history. I actually switched my Terminal.app to the Gnome Terminal because I usually need to have two or three consoles going at once, and gnome-terminal has tabs. My iBook gets sent to Cupertino on Monday for surgery and its due back on Friday so my employer was nice enough to buy me a new one, due Tuesday. Remind me to post the apple.script for launching x11.apps by double clicking icons later this week.

 

If you don't already have it install FINK under OS X its just like using debians dslecect or yum with YDL. fink install gedit and it resolves dependencies, downloads the sources and builds the software. Just a warning don't try to do everything at once. I did fink install grass a few weeks ago and my ibook was tied up from Friday afternoon till late Sunday. It took almost 12 hours to compile the algebra suite ATLAS. One thing I prefer about using FINK under OS X to using Linux for PPC is that FINK is mapping the right and left mouse buttons to [CTRL] and [ALT] while the Linuxes map to [F10] and [F11] which to me doesn't make sense if you are using your right hand on the touch pad.

[gobbledonk]

Thanks again, Adik - I did have Fink installed, but you will find that it still looks for libraries etc in the Apple standard locations (/System/Library, from memory). Yes, you can get around this, and you will often find instructions saying something along the lines of 'Dont use Apple's version of Perl / gcc / whatever, its *broken*'. Now the Apple engineers would probably have a thing or two to say about that, but what it comes down to is that you end up with 3 sets of libraries / binaries : the Apple-supplied stuff, the Fink stuff in /sw and assorted other custom-built gear in /usr/local (or /opt or wherever).

 

Fink, sensational project that it is, simply cant keep up with the massive arsenal of GNU apps out there - installing something and being told that you need to upgrade libraries really irks me. Over time, it just really started to annoy me, and I started to yearn for goold old Linux.

 

I admit that my 'tinkerer' ways are a large part of my undoing, but it comes in handy when we do need to upgrade things like gcc/Perl/Apache/mod-perl etc on production systems.

[adikgede]

This is a problem of having two seperate environments. The BSD/Darwin one and the GNU/Fink one. the problem with building from scratch in Fink is that when you ./configure its going to pick up stuff in /usr/... when you want it only to look in /sw/... This is going to happen even if /usr/... isnt in your path. You can pass arguments to ./configure or make but the easiest way to do it is :

sudo mv /usr/local /usr/local.moved and then just mv it back when your done sudo mv /usr/local.moved /usr/local. There are probably more elegant ways to do the same but thats the easiest to remember.

 

Also if you put unstable in your fink.conf file you probably will pick up a lot of stuff you felt like you were missing

Says /sw/etc/fink.conf:

---

# Fink configuration, initially created by bootstrap.pl

Basepath: /sw

RootMethod: sudo

Trees: local/main stable/main unstable/main stable/crypto

unstable/crypto /local/bootstrap

Distribution: 10.2

Mirror-cpan:

ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/

Mirror-ctan:

ftp://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/

Mirror-debian: ftp.debian.org

Mirror-gimp:

ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub

Mirror-gnome:

ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/

Mirror-gnu:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu

Mirror-kde:

ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/

Mirror-master:

http://distfiles.opendarwin.org/

Mirror-sourceforge:

http://west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/

MirrorContinent: nam

MirrorCountry: nam-us

MirrorOrder: MasterFirst

ProxyPassiveFTP: true

Verbose: 0

---

 

Here is an apple script for creating clickable X11.apps. This one for The Gimp :

Says Gimp.app:

---

tell application "Finder"

launch application "X11"

end tell

 

set results to do shell script "cd ~; DISPLAY=:0.0; export DISPLAY; PATH=$PATH:/sw/bin; export PATH; /sw/bin/gimp > /dev/null 2>&1 &"

---

 

 

You can't drag and drop with this but it helps the finder to find apps, and you can put things in the dock.

 

 

[gobbledonk]

Thanks Adik !

[BritTim]

IBM should just buy them out

---

Many people are saying this, but I think there are a bunch of good reasons against this

 

1) IBM's reputation. SCO has accused IBM of misappropriating its IP. It is not good enough for IBM to avoid damages: it must demonstrate its probity to all its partners.

 

2) Deterring others from attempting the same kinds of frivolous litigation. If IBM was to reward Darl McBride and his friends by buying SCO Group, how long will it be before others try something similar?

 

3) If IBM wants to make open source products a key part of its strategy for the future, legal battles will need to be fought at some stage: it's the American way. What better battlefield to choose than this one? SCO really has no case and the assigned judge has a good record: no ludicrous decisions.

 

4) Moral outrage. To allow SCO Group to profit from this must go against the grain of any ethical businessman. Sure, sometimes it is necessary to swallow one's feelings in business and succumb to sharp practice. That does not seem necessary here. I, for one, look forward to seeing McBride in jail sometime in 2005.

[adikgede]

While I don't think for a moment that this is anything but fluff, I think thats ironic how Caldera also aquired Dr Dos and went after M$, for which they got the thumbs up, good show, go for it seal of approval from people in the free software community.

[Guest]

"...the last person on their list of priorities is the end-user. How else can you explain an OS-based company which had a clear headstart on almost all of its competitors taking so long to build to a stable 32-bit operating system ?"

 

The major hobbling factor that has traditionally kept Windows unstable is compatibility with previous versions. The ability to run everything that's ever come before leads to all sorts of problems. Under the hood, Windows 95/98/Me still very much DOS+Wfw3.11, plus some VxDs thrown in there to make it "32 bit." Windows NT is much, much better in this regard, as its core code is not in any way descended from DOS (except that some of the same people contributed to it), but even there, the Plug and Play architecture had to be compatible with Win9x so people's devices would work, so compromises were made there. The shell had to be compatible with Win9x, so people's apps would run, so compromises were made there, ...and so on.

 

Compatibility can be a real bitch.

[ALHOLK]

Hi!

 

At least upt to WIn95 they maintained compatabillity with Windows 1.0. Has anyone ever used Winows 1.0. I have never even seen it.

 

On the other hand when thay release a new version of MS Office they are rarely concerned about backwards compatabillity and this must be one of the buggiest sotware package on the planet.

 

regards

 

ALHOLK

[gobbledonk]

Has anyone ever used Winows 1.0. I have never even seen it.

 

Hi Al,

 

No, I dont remember it either, but this link should bring on waves of nostalgia from some board members :

 

Screenshots - 1.0 to XP

 

Windows 1.01 looks an awful lot like 'DOS Shell' - a CHUI interface to DOS which shipped with 3.11, from memory. Many considered the 'CHUI' (Character-based User Interface), with its thick lines and potentially clunky feel, to be a bad thing, but I have to disagree. When you had hardware which struggled to support 640*480 graphics, and a full megabye of memory was a luxury, the CHUI made a lot of sense. Dig out an early version of Turbo Pascal for DOS if you want to see just how well this type of interface can be designed to meet the need of users on minimal hardware.

 

When you consider what the opposition had at each stage of Windows development (in addition to Apple, there was the Atari, the Commodore 64 and X on Unix boxes), I believe that M$ were playing catchup for most of the 80's and the early part of the 90's, at least in terms of the GUI. Their trump card was DOS, and every struggling developer who had cut his or her teeth on DOS was grimly determined to master the Win32 API when the time came. I believe that you can still write Win32 code for XP - its not what Microsoft want, but they couldnt completely turn their backs on the people who helped make them the monolith they are today.