I suggest a Mac OS X board

I'd like to see a Mac OS X board. It would be nice to have another UNIX platform represented here.
I was at a forum - Apple Insider - and they seem to have the same issues that newbies have when migrating to Linux from Windows - being familiar with the home directory, permissions, root, command line,ect. It is amusing to see these Unix newbies from the Apple platform get aquainted with their systems.
It would be nice to have a Mac board under 'other *nix forums'

Policy is for new distribution forums only be created if a representative from the company/organisation itself will consent to join LQ and provide help/assistance. Since Apple have their own forums, I think it unlikely.

Also, although Apple MacOSX is based on Unix, it isn't Linux and it is closed source - I, personally, don't think a Mac OSX forum appropriate for LQ. But that's my opinion.

The Mods and Jeremy can provide a more definitive answer.

Well considering we only have official representatives for actual Linux distro's, a Mac OSX forum would be nice but I personally don't feel it will generate enough traffic at this point in time. Suprisingly we don't get many questions asked regarding it and quite frankly, we get more Windows questions than it as well..

Yeah, it's probably not gonna generate much talk yet......and Apple has good forums for itself...but it's interesting. I've never paid much attention to Mac, but all of a sudden they're building machines that can run open source software that Linux users are familiar with - and run popular high-end applications as well. It's news to me.
A thought occured to me....if you could get Photoshop and Corel Draw for OS X, how hard can it be to get them to run on Linux? A OS X emulator, that'd be cool.
I'm gonna do a little more research, but after seeing the G5 and playing a little with the computer.....I want one.

Hi,

I am mostly a Linux user but I had some time to study the OS X unix foundation.

Mac OS X underlying Unix system is open source and available freely. The GUI however is proprietary as well as several graphical applications. I would say it is a mixture of BSD and GNU software as well other things. Mostly BSD tools but it does use gcc and GNU make.

To my knowledge, I do not think that Solaris and AIX are open sourced. It is not really logical to reject a forum on OS X saying it is not open source and not Linux but have forums for Solaris and AIX.

Reasons why it could be useful even if Apple have forums:

I think it will be most useful for users who either:
1) Want to install Unix applications such as Gimp etc. via Fink and other alternatives
2) Want to have both Linux and OS X live together. For example, how to dual-boot, use Mac-on-Linux, NFS, mount OS X partition in Linux, Linux ext2 in OS X etc.

Yes, they are Apple OS X forums, Mac-on-Linux mailing lists, Fink forums etc.
But when you are a newbie to Mac OS X unix system and/or Linux, you don't really know what you can do. Apple forums may be more OS X specific etc.

We could also have a Linux/PowerPC forum. That could cover Linux on PowerPC hardware. Booting and partitionning process is different than x86. Not all distro available for PowerPC etc., which best distro for PowerPC etc.

To answer Glyph question:

if you could get Photoshop and Corel Draw for OS X, how hard can it be to get them to run on Linux? A OS X emulator, that'd be cool.

NetBSD/powerpc can run some OS X programs (mostly Unix tools, there are still some problems with graphical apps) natively. About the same way, FreeBSD/x86 can run Linux/x86 programs.

There are currently no powerpc emulator. So it will be difficult to run apps compiled for PowerPC on Linux/intel. I guess Linux/powerpc could do the same thing as FreeBSD. But there is already Mac-on-Linux (it is like VMWare but is open source and for PowerPC) that allow running OS X (in user mode) inside Linux/powerpc (not necessary Mac hardware but need a PowerPC processor).

iTux

OR what about a Darwin board? That is the kernel of OS X, after all.

I see no reason not to have at least a board for any open source 'nix type including relevant areas of Mac OS X. by the way Apple released new security today.