Apple's Core OS On Your PC, For Free
Frequent contributor CptSiskoX sends this along:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsour...rwin-701.iso.gz(ISO of Darwin 7.01 for x86/PowerPC - which is basically MacOS 10.2)
more stuff:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/also see:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/d....0/release.htmlDarwin (aka Mac OS X) - ISO image available as free download for PowerPC *and* x86 (Intel/AMD/etc.)
FAQ:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/darwin/faq.htmlIt's based on BSD Unix. So my understanding is, now you can basically run MacOS X on your Athlon or P4 or whatever. <g> --- CptSiskoX
Thanks for the links, Cpt!
What's going on here is this: Many years ago, when Steve Jobs left Apple, he founded NeXT, which produced a system that was a technical marvel but that ultimately failed because almost no one could afford it. Its OS (NeXTStep) was based on a Unix variant.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he inherited an aging Mac OS that was embarrassingly out of date, long surpassed by Windows in power and capability. So, Jobs sought to combine the best of the NeXT OS with the best of the Mac OS: The Mac OS X was the result--- a modern, fully up to date, and very nice operating system.
Although the full OS X only runs on Macs, its core is not owned by Apple: It's based on Open Source software, which has developed in parallel with the Apple (and before that, NeXT) implementations. (See
http://www.opendarwin.org/ )
The OpenDarwin project gives PC users a chance to explore the guts of the Mac OS. There's even a "DarWine" project to let you run Windows applications, unmodified, on Darwin. I wouldn't recommend OpenDarwin as a first choice for a day-to-day working environment (Windows, OS X, or any of the more complete Linux distributions would be better for that), but it is an interesting project, and an impressive display of cross-platform portability.