Thread: Darwin the Progenitor of MAC OS X and iPhone OS still lives

Darwin is a OS which is the basis of Apple's Mach OS X and iPhone OS. It is released by apple after every release of its OS. Its current release is 10.0. Its kernel name is XNU which is also the Mac OS X's kernel. You can say that it is its open source version of MAC OS. Darwin is based on FreeBSD 5 and Mach 3.0. But it is just for developer.


Currently a community supported OS called PureDarwin which was taken after Open Darwin closed is also available. You ( People having apple hardware) can use it virtual image to try it out from its site. Its current release. use Darwin 9 .It can run Linux applications like Gnome. Apache, and others.Work on Darwin10 is going on. If you want to become a developer for Darwin or MAC OS X then this place is sure going to launch your career.

I'm looking for a darwin os where gnome and nautilus (and openoffice) are either readily installed by default or can be installed later from .dmg softwares.
Of course in the absence of the Aqua Desktop interface, I'm also looking to learn the commandline method of using the dmg installer to install .dmg files, so that I can start using the commandline of opendarwin os to proceed.
So, I obtained the OpenDarwin os, which I think is old and probably has updated ones with Gnome maybe from either puredarwin or gnudarwin -- but there are no website links leading to any gnome+darwin type os.
Any idea of what to do and what way to proceed?

I found the following disadvantages of opendarwin wrt macosx:

Before installation, macosx installer merely asks for a partition drive with an hfs+ format, whereas opendarwin asks for an entire disk on which the formatting into hfs+ format will be done before installation.

I found that in case of macosx, everything is easy with the mouse, but not when carrying it out entirely from the apple's xterminal, except for the shell-commands common with the linuxes. Moreover, we cannot install oracle10g for intelmac -- but this is more than compensated with a fastest running solution for postgresql. When it comes to configuring web2, macosx stands behind both windows and ubuntu/pclinuxos -- I was not able to configure django and zope, but succeeded for rails and plone (minus zope).

And I thought that it will be better to at least learn a simple dmg-installation from the apple's xterminal than depend everything on double-click for installations, which the dmg-installer does in the background.

We require either the bonjour services or the zeroconf network for internet.
However, the bonjour-services is free for windows but not for macosx.
Installed the alternative one, i.e. zeroconf-network which was free for both windows and macosx -- out of which the one for macosx is available in the name SABnzbd.dmg, which (after installation and running app), contends for port no 80 with plone which remains unavailable even after plone's uninstallation -- hope that opendarwin will be easier for us to modify port nos of each web2 dependent apps.
Then installed the Cabos (Network Neighborhood) which was free for both windows and macosx.
However, on one hand Cabos tends to hang macosx for while, and on the other hand tends to crash itself in windows after some no of sessions/uses -- so bonjour and zeroconf remain the main ones.
Installed softwares based on gtk/qt/wx as .dmgs for running in the macosx which I hope would also run in the darwin os.
However, .dmgs for some important softwares unique for each version not usable on another -- i.e. the .dmgs for v10.3, v10.4, v10.5 and v10.6 although installable across they do not initiate the program-app and are hence of not much use outside the specific version os -- and hence I thought that this might restrict to either build new .dmgs each for opendarwin, or use source code via shellscript.