opendarwin

2004 Dec 16 at 18:48 » Tagged as :

I tried my hand at setting up opendarwin, the process was a bit scary, the shivers begin when you have a look at the fdisk program that looks so different from what you find on linux. (what command do you use to make a new partition?). I reckoned the safe approach would be to plug in a different hard disk and let the auto partitioning system have it's way with it.

The installation thereafter proceeded in double quick time. After all there is only one CD. The problem is in the booting. No matter what you do the system would refuse to boot. All you get is a screen of a chewed off applet with a ticker on it that keeps going round and round in circles nothing more. No error messages, no warnings no beeps.

The kernel supposedly accepts additional parameters such as location of root device etc, unfortunately it does not seem to do accpet them and the documentation (the little that exists) is rather cryptic.

Finally I came across one doc that casually mentioned that opendarwin may not work with IDE drives. Mmm, now I suppose I will have to get a scsi drive or will this go into my USB drive?

I read in the faqs that OS X programs may not run in opendarwin but console applications and x applications will. Fat use that is. This seems more primitive than the first version of linux (a slackware distro) that I attempted to install so long (8 years) ago. I don't recall whether it had X on it (my installation certainly didn't) but it was certainly a lot easier to install and use.