Where does Mac osx and darwin begin ?

B

bbolin

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You need to excuse me I'm very new to Mac osx. I have worked with FreeBSD for years. Also other Linux distributions.

From the Mac destkop it says 10.4(tiger). From a unix shell it says Darwin verion.number(don't have it in hand).

Is Max osx just the desktop version ?
 
Darwin is the UNIX-y part of OS X that most users don't ever see. It's also open source under Apple's license and uses the Mach microkernel. The part that gives you the eye candy and the other nice features of OS X is Quartz/Quartz Extreme (the rendering engine for the GUI) and Aqua (the eyecandy in the GUI). The sum of all of this makes up "Mac OS X."

You can download Darwin and install it on either a Mac or a PC (the latter being the reason many of the rumors about an x86 Mac OS X are now true ;)). There are also flavors of Darwin like OpenDarwin and GNU-Darwin that are distributed under their own licenses. If I am correct, all three Darwin projects collaborate with one another on technologies. The only thing that is missing from Darwin in and of itself is the proprietary Quartz and Aqua layers which make up Mac OS X.
 
Thanks for your reply.

So when your doing software updates from the mac gui, is it doing the "UNIX-y" stuff or the eye candy part?

Is the eye candy X11
 
No, the eye candy provided by Aqua is what makes up the look of OS X. The engine used to provide the GUI is Quartz, which is closed source from Apple. Apple does have an X11 that can be installed on OS X in order to run programs that use X Windows on OS X, like OpenOffice or GIMP.

Software Update is just one of many graphical tools used by Mac OS X. Software Update updates anything in Mac OS X that needs to be updated, whether it be a UNIX command or process or some high-level GUI application. It's all integrated into one package that is OS X. Of course, this only updates software that was made available on your OS X system from Apple. In other words, if you have something like Firefox on there, Software Update won't perform updates to that program since it wasn't originally included with the operating system. However, Safari and other Apple applications are updated through there, and you can manually download those updated from Apple if you choose to do so.

Consider Synaptic, which is a graphical front end to apt-get in Debian-based distros. This not only updates the low level stuff that might be commadn line based if it's an application, but also the stuff X11 uses and even X11 itself, as well as the desktop environment used. Same thing with Software Update.
 
Fink/FinkCommander is closer to Synaptic since it's basically dealing with the oipen source UNIX apps, but it doesn't update Mac OS X. It allows you to install a myriad of the open source UNIX applications (even desktop environments and yes, even X windows) that fink has in its repositories.

Software Update, however, is basically to update the Apple-supplied portions of OS X, such as their shipped applications and utilities be they command line or GUI.

The premise between Software Update and Synaptic/Fink/FinkCommander are pretty much the same though.
 
Does Software Update ever change the kernel ?

uname -a

Could the latest darwin be installed and then using mac osx cd install Quartz/Quartz Extreme (the rendering engine for the GUI) and Aqua (the eyecandy in the GUI)
 
As far as i know, this isn't possible since the rest of OS X is tied to the Darwin version. If there are any security or maintenance updates to OS X, that will also show in Darwin.

Usually when a new version of Darwin comes out, it is released at the same time as a new version of OS X. So this would be a moot point. Also, there is no way you could do this since you would have to know how to integrate it with the other variations of Darwin. Even if you were to try a custom install from the Mac OS X CDs, there's no possible way of doing this. Apple doesn't provide the upper level parts of Mac OS X as a separate installation. It comes already with the Darwin included in Mac OS X.
 
Nixgeek,

Really appreciate your imput. As you see I had some basic fundamental questions. I'm sure there will be more.

btb
 
No problem. :) If you want to ask me any more questions, you can send mea private message and we can discuss it that way, unless you also want the input from other users here, in which case just post it in the usual way. :)
 
I'd say use the forums. Any answers to questions can help other users later on.
 
I would say that too, but sometimes having someone help you personally that understand the situation can help. But yeah, the forum is definitely a better place to get all the answers.:)
 
bbolin said:
Does Software Update ever change the kernel ?
Click to expand...
Well, to help with this question, lets look at the kernel version numbers and the version numbers for Mac OS X since the first version of Mac OS X was seeded to developers...
Mac OS 10.0 (Mac OS X Developer Preview)
Mac OS 10.0 (Mac OS X Developer Preview 2)
Darwin 1.0 (Mac OS X Developer Preview 3)
Darwin 1.1 (Mac OS X Developer Preview 4)
Darwin 1.2.1 (Mac OS X Public Beta
Darwin 1.3.1 (Mac OS X v.10.0.0-10.0.4)
Darwin 1.4.1 (Mac OS X v.10.1)
Darwin 5.1-5.5 (Mac OS X v.10.1.1-10.1.5)
Darwin 6.0-6.8 (Mac OS X v.10.2.0-10.2.8)
Darwin 7.0-7.9 (Mac OS X v.10.3.0-10.3.9)*
Darwin 8.0-8.x (Mac OS X v.10.4.0-10.4.x)​
So yes the kernel is updated with every update of Mac OS X (* with the exception of 10.3.1, but that was actually a mistake in the labeling of the kernel). The version numbers of Darwin were changed to match the version numbers of Mac OS X with Darwin 5.1 (Mac OS X v.10.1.1).
Could the latest darwin be installed and then using mac osx cd install Quartz/Quartz Extreme (the rendering engine for the GUI) and Aqua (the eyecandy in the GUI)
Click to expand...
The versions of Darwin that are downloadable as stand alone installations are actually behind the versions of Mac OS X that are fully up to date.

As for hacking the Mac environment onto a different version of Darwin than it was supposed to be run on, people have tried to do this (with no success that I know of)... and it seems like a wasted effort. The Mac environment is very integrated into Mac OS X.
 
Thanks very much for your reply. It's nice to know that osx isn't just the eye candy but intergrated with the o/s.

After all isn't that what Mac "os" x means.

os=operating system

Don't really want to hack osx, that wasn't my intension. However I am interesting in using open source applications. Have been doing a lot of "finking"

btb
 
if anyone here was ever able to give you a good explanation of Darwin/Mac OS X, it would be RacerX. I bow before your skills. :D
 
nixgeek said:
I bow before your skills. :D
Click to expand...
Well, I wouldn't take it that far... there are a lot of Unix types of things (even in Mac OS X) that I don't have a lot of experience with.

... but I'm pretty good with the historical and big picture types of things with this stuff. :D
 
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