“Only one more week until Apple Computer Inc. makes the
long-awaited Mac OS X public beta available to us rabble. This
event isn’t earth-shattering by virtue of Apple hitting this
milestone, though. Instead, it registers on the Richter scale
because it’s a big step closer to delivering the first Unix-based
consumer-oriented OS.”
“…it’s downright mean for Apple to… kick loose no
information about that older hardware. It’s facile to argue that
Linux for PowerPC (both the monolithic and Mk versions)
has most of these drivers already, but that’s not the
point. A lot of that work has been trial and error; rather
than trying to get hardware support working in Darwin (and erring),
it would be much more efficient — not to mention result in
more-reliable drivers — if Apple actually coughed up the docs. I
have two Old World PCI machines that I’d quite like to run Darwin
on, and the prospects aren’t great at the moment.”
“Plenty of prospective customers — especially the corporate
crowd — will with very good reason inherently distrust any young
and untried Unix. Make no mistake: OS X’s BSD APIs may be standard,
but OS X’s guts are very shiny new technology, most of which hasn’t
seen any kind of field testing like, say, the [way] xBSDs or even
Linux has. And it’s not like new bugs aren’t being found in Linux
and its standard apps and libs today, many years after their
introductions. … People try stuff out on older hardware;
anecdotes are legion of resurrected 486s running Samba on Linux as
proof-of-concept before The Big New Hardware Purchase. This is
precisely the kind of thing that Apple needs to foster, not
quash.”