Hey guys and welcome to Nomadic Dmitry channel.
So, today we are going to talk about Darwin and OpenDarwin.
What is Darwin in the context of operating systems?
Darwin is the core of Mac OS.
It's been a technology that is built in Mac OS for the past 20 years.
The earlier beta versions were even before that.
It's the core of Mac OS those days and it's still a modern technology.
It's still very relevant and very necessary.
Very good system for an average and advanced user.
Darwin is based on multiple technologies: NeXTSTEP, BSD and Mach.
NeXTSTEP was the project that Steve Jobs and his team worked before returning to Apple
in 1997.
NeXTSTEP was integrated into Mac OS and it's still visible in many places.
For example, the "NS" prefix is visible in Objective-C programming language.
If you start writing code - you will see this prefix for some methods.
For example - NSDate.
It's still a core of Mac OS.
In some places it's really visible.
Also, an interesting fact.
Apple was more open to OpenSource community before.
That's why they have released the binaries.
It was a compiled version which was called OpenDarwin.
It was released to a wide range of Operating Systems.
This was called an OpenDarwin.
It's an abandoned project.
In 2006 it was abandoned.
The latest released version was 8.0.1.
The last release was in 2004.
I have a copy of OpenDarwin.
It's challenge to find it those days, most of the repositories are no longer operational.
OpenDarwin was interesting because you were able to install it on any computer.
There are also other OS projects, like PureDarwin released.
There were multiple attempts to make Darwin a full fledged OS, but all those attempts
have failed, because there was not much involvement anymore.
People were interested in it only when it was integrated in Mac OS.
This seems to be the reason behind it.
But I was always curious about installing OpenDarwin on a hard drive to see how it works.
I initially started with installing it on Virtual machine.
Those attempt failed.
I was not able to boot it, each time it just stuck during the startup.
Then I decided to try another computer for it.
Since you cannot run it on modern hardware, I used my IBM T42 computer.
It's 2004 and that's why we need to use computers from that era.
I installed it on a flash drive.
I was able to install it just fine on that computer.
It worked.
The installation is a typical installation of BSD type operating systems.
You
specify the source of installation, customize it accordingly and it works fine.
It's a text based convenient installer.
It's simple to follow.
I decided that I wanted to install GNOME and X11 system on top of it.
I wanted to have a Graphical Interface to interact with operating system.
I've tried to use MacPorts for that reason.
I've grabbed the latest version (source).
I have a video about MacPorts and package management on modern Mac.
It's a great package management system.
But when I tried to install the latest version on OpenDarwin it didn't worked.
I expected that, so I decided to try the older version of MacPorts.
There was a graphical installer for Mac, but there was no console installer.
That's why I have tried to compile it from sources.
It didn't worked.
My next attempt was grabbing my Mac OS X Tiger CD and copying X11 filed from an Optional
Installer package on the CD.
I manually copied those files.
I plugged the flash drive to my computer and manually copied those.
After I copied all those - the system didn't boot.
There is no simple solution here.
It was interesting to explore the OpenDarwin because it's using HFS+ here and many of modern
Mac OS concepts are visible there.
One of the Mac games was present there - Chess.app was in the "Applications" folder.
I was curious about all this because I saw a screenshot on Wikipedia with a fully installed
system and GNOME desktop environment.
I thought that the graphical interface could be installed on OpenDarwin easily.
I thought that it might be even optionally available on the CD.
But there was nothing like that there.
There was no package manager there or GUI interface.
It was just a stripped down version of Mac OS (without GUI and Apple stuff.
Just kernel and system extensions).
If you want to do something useful with it you could try to compile some components from
scratch.
You can install Midnight Commander or any other apps there, but still there wouldn't
be much point.
Network was also working fine, so you can perform some network activities there.
I'm not sure what you could do with it since it's a 16 years old
operating system and there is no practical use for it.
You will have better luck if you try a modern Darwin (well, it's hard) and compile from
source.
It takes time and FreeBSD might be even a better solution here since it has everything
there.
FreeBSD also has a great package manager and all the tools you need.
OpenDarwin makes no practical sense anymore, but it's interesting just to take a look at
such projects from time to time.
I will not suggest you to try that unless you are really interested in learning more
about the core of Mac OS.
OpenDarwin and PureDarwin were great attempts to have open source community version of Mac
OS Core, but Apple was not interested anymore (probably there are other reasons too) and
all those attempts failed in my opinion.
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See you soon!