Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 04:46:08 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Steven Grady: MacOS X (or "I can't believe it's not UNIX!") Message-ID: <25804.951828368@zippy.cdrom.com>
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Something I thought you guys might find interesting.. ------- Forwarded Message Subject: MacOS X (or "I can't believe it's not UNIX!") From: grady@xcf.berkeley.edu (Steven Grady) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <44935.951809024.1@scam.XCF.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:23:45 -0800 Sender: grady@scam.xcf.berkeley.edu I have the opportunity to play with MacOS X, and since I hadn't heard any discussion here about it, I thought I'd give my impressions. A colleague used the phrase "I can't believe it's not UNIX!" which I thought was funny, but it's wrong. It _is_ UNIX, a mishmash of BSD versions, plus some Mach thrown in. The information about the architecture is available elsewhere, but I gotta say, the experience just tickled me. From the start, where you can boot in "verbose" mode (i.e. you get to see the kernel messages), to the opening of the terminal emulator (the default shell is tcsh), to the fact that ssh2 ungzipped, untarred, configured, and compiled, without a hitch, to the fact that I can use "ps guxw" to my heart's content, to the experience of telnetting in and seeing "4.4 BSD" at the login prompt... Ahh, it's like sitting down in an easy chair to re-read a favorite book. Meanwhile, the interface is flashy, to say the least. Of course, I'd prefer to just hook up a vt100 to a serial port, but we don't have any in the office, so I'll make do with Aqua. Everything slides, throbs, morphs, and mutates all over the place. Heavy use of translucency, growing and shrinking, and other things that are computationally intensive, just to make the interface look nice. For the most part, it works, although the weirdest stuff is distracting (icons that grow as the mouse moves over them, windows that funnel down to the icons), but you can turn off some of it. A few other clever things -- the preferences screen has "editing locked" until you type the root password for certain operations (the usual -- changing the date, setting up networking, etc.) The MacOS 9 operation is impressive (although still buggy) -- you can run OS 9 in an emulation mode that works pretty well, and you can choose whether to run it windowed or integrated with the rest of the applications (and the OS 9 Finder knows about the OS X apps; tricky business, that). One of the interesting things is the fact that it uses devfs, the virtual device filesystem developed for FreeBSD by Julian Elischer. Julian wasn't able to get it into the standard FreeBSD core, but it made it into the Mac. Pretty cool. Also, I was slightly miffed to see that /etc/rc ends with "exit 0" rather than "sh /etc/rc.local" (I think) -- my guess is that although they're happy enough to use UNIX as a base, they don't want their customers going behind the curtain. But I can use the _real_ vi on a Mac. That makes up for a lot. (I haven't tried compiling Emacs yet.) Anyway, it's interesting. It's too bad the cool new stuff (i.e. Aqua etc.) is not open source, but I have to say that I could envision getting a G4 rather than x86 for my next BSD system... If people have specific questions, I can probably answer them. Steven "I haven't time to go chasing after him! There's violence to be done!" ------- End of Forwarded Message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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