Re: MacOS X installation

[W . Northcott]

Marcus wrote:
>Like Apple says: Think Different.  Gratuitously.

Which might be regarded as demonstrating some lack of appreciation of
Apple's goals in making UNIX usable by Mom and Pop users.  For me, the
whole package mechanism with its defined applications and frameworks,
which can be installed or more importantly deinstalled by drag copying,
are well worth the departure from 20+ year old 'NIX norms.  Given that all
this stuff is part of the opensource Darwin, which is close to running on
Intel, I would not be surprised to see the ideas creeping into Linux.

Having had my little bitch, let me say that I am very interested in
porting Swarm to MacOS X.  My office computer is a Mac, and so are both
the computers at home.

However, there is no point wasting time on the current public beta.  That
has served its purpose: to get feedback from users that has resulted in
substantial beneficial change (mainly in the GUI) to the finished product.
 The release version will be very different.  The GUI is much more like
Classic MacOS while the underpinnings will be much more GNU friendly due
the work being done by the Darwin hackers.

If you are really in a hurry you need to pony up the U$500 for an Apple
Select Developer membership, which will get you more up to date MacOS X
builds and all the tools.
Otherwise sign on the  Darwin mail lists, where senior Apple developers
are very active, and keep up with the latest releases of X on X stuff.
For any list members not up on this I think the current state is roughly
thus:
The standard GPL Xfree distribution now compiles and runs on Darwin or
Public Beta with Quartz graphics disabled.  That gives you a standard
XFree environment which will support fvwm or Afterstep.  gtk+ and Gimp
have ported to this environment but so far not tk or BLT which would be
needed to compile Swarm.
If you want to have this work on an Aqua desktop you can use VNCserver as
the Xserver various various ported VNCviewers, or there are a couple Xaqua
type things that are Xservers which display in Aqua windows.

Of course the best solution would be to port tk and BLT to Aqua directly
without X, which basically sucks.  IMO that will probably happen. Somebody
could carbonise the old Classic TCL/tk or more likely, given that open
source coders usually try to do it right, go straight to Cocoa, which is
of course Objective-C.

At the end of the day this port has to be easier than Windoze.

Bill Northcott

PS does anybody know if Apple's version of gdb will compile and run with a
standard gcc 2.95.2?



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