Darwin 8.0.1 Available

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Apple's finally released binary versions of Darwin 8.0.1 for both PowerPC and x86 (Apple ID required to download from Apple mirrors). ISO (for x86) and CDR (for PowerPC) images are available for download. This comes a few weeks after Apple posted source code for Darwin 8, which you can get from here."

Finally!

[poopdeville]

I can afford Tiger!

Oh, wait....

Seriously, does anyone know if it would be difficult to swap out the Darwin component of Panther with Darwin 8?

Intel?

[sootman]

I tried Darwin on Intel earlier this year on a 1 GHz Athlon and was amazed at how slow it was. Like, typing 'ls /' gave output at a rate of a couple lines per second. I'm not exaggerating, it was like what you get when you run 'ls' against a floppy. What kind of experience have others had? Has anyone installed Darwin on Intel and wound up with a usable box? It's entirely possible something went wrong for me, or I did something wrong myself, but I want to see what it's been like for others before I go around saying 'Darwin on Intel is slow.'

darwin (but not os x) users?

[sleepypants]

I'm curious about the number of people who run Darwin (but not OS x) on Apple hardware. I have Darwin 8.0 already as part of OS X and see no good reason to strip off the GUI and go "Darwin only". On x86, the hardware compatibility list seems to be woefully short. Is releasing Darwin just a feel-good thing for Apple, to show support for the open-source world? I can't believe it's just PR, yet I can't see the user base being there either. The whole appeal of Macs (at least for me) is to get the nice GUI plus the UNIX underpinning rather than Yet Another UNIX-like distribution in Darwin.

Re:darwin (but not os x) users?

[mjsottile77]

I haven't tried it myself, but there are times that it seems a binary compatible UNIX would be nice as an alternative to OSX. Quite often I find myself running plain-old C apps that perform much better and much more consistently if I boot OSX into console mode to disable the GUI infrastructure. It seems a pure darwin compute slave might be slightly more transparent to use than recompiling my code to run on *BSD or an OSX box setup to boot console only. Of course, this is purely speculation - I haven't tried it myself. Anyoe out there tried this?

Re:darwin (but not os x) users?

[gidds]

Darwin's usefulness spreads far wider than just those who use it directly.

For example, as a Mac OS X user, when I discovered a problem in the MSDOS-format volume handling (specifically, a minor incompatibility with CF cards that had been used on EPOC/Symbian OS), I was able to use the Darwin source to fix it myself. I downloaded and searched the relevant source code, instrumented/recompiled/ran a few user-land programs, found the problem, fixed and tested it, and then submitted it to Apple, who (after a nice chat with one of their engineers) put it into Darwin 7 and Mac OS X 10.3. It was hardly a major change, just 3 or 4 lines IIRC, but I'd not have been able to do it without Darwin's source code.