[Ti] OS X on a PC? [forward from a different list]

[Chris Olson]

On Sunday, January 26, 2003, at 10:23 AM, Zawadzki, Dan wrote:

> It IS possible that this guy claiming to have X running on his X86
> hardware had something like VMWare running with a fancy OSX theme 
> faking
> the Aqua interface.  Did you actually see this guy BOOT to X?  I think
> not...it is not mechanically possible to run OSX on X86 hardware.

That's what I would think too.  However, OS X is not supported on 
VMWare, so I would highly doubt that OS X was actually running on 
there.  He could've faked it, though, with an Aqua theme for KDE and 
been using linux or FreeBSD for the OS X fake with a KDE UI.  If you 
only watched it for a couple of minutes I could see how you could be 
fooled into believing it was running OS X.  After fooling around with 
Darwin development for the past few weeks, I could think of no thread 
layer that would make it physically possible to boot and run OS X on 
x86 hardware.  There are too many fundamental differences between the 
PPC and x86 architectures.

There are even many differences between x86 Darwin and PPC Darwin.  x86 
Darwin is extremely unstable, crashes or locks alot, and won't compile 
software without tons of errors.  If you can get it running at all, you 
should just be happy with being able to log in at the command line and 
posting to the dev list that you got it running.  I haven't found any 
real use for it yet - not even for development, because it's so 
unstable.  About 50% of the people who try it can't get all the way 
thru the install, even on compatible hardware.

PPC Darwin, on the other hand, is coming along nicely.  For those more 
adventurous, you can see what PPC Darwin looks like right on your Ti.  
Set up your OS X login options so you have to enter a username and 
password to log onto OS X at the login prompt.  Instead of typing in 
your name, type a right bracket and then the word "console" like so:
 >console
Then press the enter key.  You will then be greeted with the pure 
Darwin operating system running underneath OS X, sans Aqua.  If you 
don't like what you see, just login with your username and password and 
type "exit" or "logout" to get back to familiar territory.  Be advised 
that sometimes the logout will appear to freeze and the machine will 
hang if you type exit.  But when it does this, it is still logging 
keystrokes and if you type logout you will get back to the OS X login.  
But otherwise, I can start X Windows and KDE3 from the Darwin command 
prompt and once you have an X Windows UI running, you can't really tell 
much difference between Linux and Darwin.  FWIW, KDE3 is blazingly 
fast, compared to OS X, on the same hardware.  I'll have to see if I 
can find an Aqua theme for Darwin KDE3 and see what it looks like.
--
Chris