How close is Mac OSX to Linux 2336

On 14 Jul 2006 13:26:27 -0700, gmax2006 staggered into the Black Sun and said:

No. OS X is a Mach microkernel with a BSD-ish userland and syscalls. There's also a proprietary set of graphics drivers-functions that do what X does, and the functions you call to draw stuff are part of the "Cocoa" framework. The whole structure is as closely related to Linux as a cat is to a penguin. (They're both chordates, both endothermic, both carbon-based, but there are *tons* of differences both gross and fine.)

This is actually easier than you may think. Most of the Linux GUI apps really want X to be there, but recent OS X builds include an X server. I don't know whether people have tried to port many GUI apps over to OS X.0 Take the following sentence with several grains of salt. It might be really easy to port X apps (if the apps just used Xlib), reasonably easy (if the apps used SDL or wxWindows or something), semi-annoying (if the apps used GTK+), or really annoying (if the apps used Qt.) Widget sets may or may not make huge differences, depending on how much crack the developers were on and whether they were aiming for cross-platform workability or just wanted it to compile on Linux.

Anything that runs in a terminal should Just Compile And Work, except anyone knows more about the whole thing, please chime in.

0 Cue the Mac-heads saying "But OS X has so much better GUI apps than Linux ever had!"

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL