LinuxWorld.

[Alan DuBoff]

Rick Moen wrote:

> Yes, you are.  Deirdre's point was that Macintosh OS X is essentially a
> revised version of NeXTStep, which came out about three years earlier
> than 386BSD / FreeBSD / NetBSD.  Thus, it makes more sense to say that
> the _latter_ modified the directory structures and kernel.

Ah, I see her point now...however, I did have an original Next when they came
out in the late '80s, and it was not modified like OSX is today. IOW, it was a
completely different OS that had a traditional unix filesystem under it, and
the directories were not modified to have /Users and /Library off root as OSX
is today. They have moved closer in regards to tools as the gnu compiler is
used on OSX now, and objective-c was used on the NeXT.

While NeXTStep might have come out before the above, weren't the above
spin-offs from Berkeley Unix which certainly pre-dated NeXTStep? It seems it
was only symatics of what was or was not free according to AT&T.

Even so, I don't see the motivation to keep Mac OSX different than the BSD
that is available today, which is the current problem with OSX as it is
currently implemented.

> FYI:
> http://www.mrcla.com/XonX/
> ...
> Alternatively, and possibly better, here's a totally different approach:
> http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/~jsw/macosx_xvnc/
> ...
> Proprietary solution, providing support for X on the Aqua desktop:
> http://www.tenon.com/products/xtools/

I'll check these out, looks interesting to have them both running. My boss
does have a proprietary xserver that will run on the desktop of the Mac, but
I'll venture off to look at the vnc solution, that looks interesting.

I see Apple's technology coming to OpenSource over time anyway, as developers
continue to defect from Apple (i.e., Eazel). Nautilus certainly has some
features that are not present inside of OSX even (like vector bitmap icons on
the canvases). Even though GNOME is big and bloated, if it could create a
similar glue layer between the GUI and filesystem, it could probably work
also. Apple doesn't seem to want to help as much as they seem to want to get
help, and it seems selfish to me.

> Deirdre is in the East Coast, today, and will be back next Friday.

Hope she has a safe trip, seems the weather has been horrid in parts of the
east. My sister moved out here last year and my brother-in-law was telling me
he talked with his brother in New Jersey last week and they were completely
snowed in with a really wet, heavy snow. Gotta love the weather in CA.

-- 

Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.