linux apps and Mac OS X
 

Heard that Mac OS X runs a unix core and was wondering if all those great (and free) linux apps could be recompiled to work on Mac OS X. Anybody know anything about this?

Yes, pretty much all of them. My neighbor has one of those titanium thingies with OSX on it. First you would probably have to download bash and compile that... and then a bunch of X. The homepage of any given project these days usually has compile info for OSX.

Cheers,

Finegan

The "UNIX-ness" of the MAC OS X that everyone is talking about is Darwin, which is based on the BSD Mach kernel. It is, however, implemented for the Motorola-based architecture used in Macs.
There have been ports of many x86-based *NIX apps, including XFree86 (XDarwin) to OS X, but not all have been ported. The last time I used OS X, it used tch as its shell. I've heard that bash will run as well, but I haven't tried yet.