Admittedly the filesystem is more like NeXTSTEP (So yes it's like Unix and
uses the UFS instead of HFS+ ), than MacOS 8.x.
And though I'm sure it's not beyond the means of some industrious programmer
to hack the UI and replace it with something else (They offer the Darwin
kernel without a UI as part of their Apple public source program), I don't
think it's going to be very easy to replace the one on OS X Server and
retain overall system functionality as it is very tightly interfaced with
the system even to a low level. OS X Client will have the Quartz layer which
will replace QuickDraw and that will make it even more difficult again.
Steve Jobs has said on a few occasions that he will not allow people to take
away control of the Mac desktop from Apple and he'll do "What ever it takes"
to make it as difficult as possible for people to do to so, in the interests
of maintaining consistency of appearance in applications. When the iCEO of a
company says stuff like that in public you can be sure that he has a buch of
geeks on the campus losing sleep because they have to come up with ways to
make it happen.
Frankly both the Apple developers and Mac Users tend to agree with him, and
believe that another UI would not offer any immediate benefits in the long
term.
As for apps that run under X, I'm sure that if people wait long enough port
efforts will spring up all over the net that will "Carbonise" the more
popular apps and allow them to be run on OS X in the same way that people
are porting X apps to BeOS.
Mark.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Jakma [SMTP:Paul.Jakma at Digital.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 07, 1999 8:10 AM
> To: ilug at linux.ie> Subject: RE: [ILUG] [OT] Linux +Macs & Rhapsody
>>> how much of a "Unix" is OS X? same sort of filesystem layout? text
> configuration files in /etc? if yes, it must surely be possible with a
> little editing to disable starting the apple gui and instead start X, or
> not?
>>
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