# Porting Aqua and Quartz to x86



## tosk (Nov 29, 2002)

I know there's a group out there who's dedicated to porting Aqua and Quartz to x86. Does anyone know if this group has a site or anything? Is anyone here trying to accomplish the same feat? Or perhaps making an Aqua-like environment for Darwin/x86?


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## RacerX (Nov 29, 2002)

It helps to remember that Quartz is Apple's answer to the (very) expensive Display Postscript rendering engine by Adobe. When NeXT and Sun made their application environment specifications (OpenStep) open source a new project was formed by the open source community call GNUstep (a window manager/application environment for unix and unix-like operating systems). Being an open source project, they also needed a way around Adobe's Display Postscript. The solution they are working on is call Display Ghostscript, but I'm really not sure just how far they have gotten with it. Everyone on the project does this in their spare time.

Also Aqua and Quartz are not open source. These are proprietary technologies owned by Apple. The only people who would be working on a port would be them, and they wouldn't let people on the outside know about it (or have access to it).

One idea that was floated around for a while was replacing Mach OS in Rhapsody 5.1 with Darwin, but as it turns out Darwin is to different for this to work correctly (and generally there would be little noticeable improvement even if it did work).

If you are looking for a _theme_ Im quite sure that some one has made an Aqua theme to run in WindowMaker or the like. I havent been following the themes for quite some time so Ill leave that to some one else to answer and provide more information.


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## UtaTr3y (Nov 30, 2002)

> One idea that was floated around for a while was replacing Mach OS in Rhapsody 5.1 with Darwin, but as it turns out Darwin is to different for this to work correctly (and generally there would be little noticeable improvement even if it did work).



Darwin comprises of Mach 3.0 (I beleive). Mach is not an OS, its a Kernel. Mach is FreeBSD's kernel, Darwin is FreeBSD's kernel with a few Apple/Mac specific features... thats all...

There is however a project that is working to make a functional OS with a darwin foundation.

The KDE theme "Liquid" is about the closest you will get to a Mac OS X look and feel for that however...


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## RacerX (Nov 30, 2002)

> _Originally posted by UtaTr3y _
> *Mach is not an OS, its a Kernel. Mach is FreeBSD's kernel, Darwin is FreeBSD's kernel with a few Apple/Mac specific features... thats all...*



Interesting, you should take the time to tell it's creators that.



> _From the CMU Mach home page:_
> *Project Mach was an operating systems research project of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 1985 to 1994.
> *



So is Darwin not an operating system? Apple seems to think so. And Apple also seems to think that Darwin as an OS can run some major apps (like Apache and Apples own Quicktime Streaming Server). What is an operating system to _you_ then?

Mach was designed and developed to stand on it's own. NeXT licensed 4.3BSD for use as an interface layer and application environment and developed their own application environment and window management system (using Adobe's technology for rendering images on the screen) all to run on top of the Mach OS and called there creation NeXTSTEP (years before anyone had even thought of FreeBSD). This moduler design is why OpenStep could be moved from Mach to Solaris and even Windows. OpenStep for Solaris looked almost exactly the same as OPENSTEP for Mach (of course Sun is also using Display Postscript, which helped). 

I didnt know about "Liquid", so thank you for that information.


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## MacCoaster (Dec 18, 2002)

Darwin is the underlying UNIX operating system comprised of basic commands including the shell.

Mach is the kernel of the Darwin operating system.

Mach is not the kernel of FreeBSD;  FreeBSD has their own kernel. Although it is possible to make a BSD implementation inspired operating system to use Mach as the kernel... that's what Darwin is.

First post for me.


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## strobe (Jan 8, 2003)

xnu is the kernel, not Mach. The file is named Mach and it contains the bulk of OSF Mach 3, but it has a lot of other stuff in there.

hint: Mach isn't a 3.7MB binary. xnu is HUGE!

As for what is an OS and what isn't an OS the classic definition of an OS is a program that creates an abstraction which allows programs to access hardware via an API/ABI instead of directly and so Mach can be considered an OS. In fact an OS doesn't even have to be a separate task of any sort or a persistent program loaded in memory. It can merely be a protocol to access hardware. Some people seem to think it isn't an OS unless it has stuff like filesystem APIs, but there were OSs long before there were filesystems (and anyway filesystems suck).

Anyway for something which actually relates to the original topic I don't see any Quartz-like display server being developed since everybody else appears to be satisfied with their current crappy display servers. Aqua on the other hand is a human interface standard not a piece of code. It would be possible to write a program on another platform which follows the standard, however yet again everybody else appears to be satisfied with their own crappy interfaces (if they weren't they would use a Mac instead).


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