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:
Quote:
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.
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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