mac and linux drivers compatible?

watashiwaotaku7 · 01-20-2003, 08:43 PM

now i dont really know what im talking about here but i was just wondering if because osX is built on/around linux would the drivers or other software be compatible with linux then?

CRego3D · 01-20-2003, 08:51 PM

osX is built around BSD

Hegemon · 01-20-2003, 09:03 PM

There are versions of Linux built to run on macs
http://www.penguinppc.org/

watashiwaotaku7 · 01-20-2003, 09:31 PM

but could you run mac programs on linux then?

jkrohn · 01-20-2003, 11:49 PM

You can't really just compile and run many programs, as while OSX is based on BSD, a lot of things are not the same. It does not keep the same directory structure for starters.

While you cannot, for the most part, just throw apps from one to the other, porting back and forth is generally a trivial procedure.

nakkaya · 01-21-2003, 12:55 AM

they are not mac cpu structure is disfferent regular pc s use intel or amd but mac uses motorola(i might be wrong) and as someone said os x built on freebsd u have to recompile programs in doing so it may still not work on linux

bulliver · 01-21-2003, 12:59 AM

Quote:

porting back and forth is generally a trivial procedure

Yeah, sure. If you speak C...

jkrohn · 01-21-2003, 03:15 AM

Quote:

Yeah, sure. If you speak C...

hehe, not trivial for the individual, trivial for the developer :-P So if you have a program on say Mac OSX that you REALLY want on linux, bother the developer

(j/k) Someone somewhere can do it, and it's usually not that difficult.

Hegemon · 01-21-2003, 03:37 AM

You carn't run mac programs on the linux version for mac but you can dual boots, also there is a mac on linux emulator you could use.

mhearn · 01-21-2003, 03:47 AM

jkrohn: that is not entirely accurate, is it?

It's trivial to port Linux software to the Mac, because all the API implementations are open source and available for free (and often written with portability in mind).

It's practically impossible to port a MacOS X app (ie one built for MacOS) to anything else without a huge investment in work, probably a rewrite especially if you use Cocoa. Mac apps make use of all kinds of Apple proprietary APIs, like CoreAudio, IOKit, Quartz, Aqua and the various frameworks it ships with. These are not available on Linux.

Allowing Mac apps to run on Linux would require a Wine style recreation effort, which would probably be sued on no firm legal grounds as Apple is prone to do, and as there are no "killer" Mac apps (the iApps are not in this category) surprisingly nobody has bothered to even start.

Mac drivers are not compatible with Linux drivers, but as Linux has better hardware support than the Mac anyway, I don't see why anybody should care.

jkrohn · 01-21-2003, 10:51 AM

I stand corrected on porting from OSX to Linux