Does OSX Leopard 10.5 compare with any Distro?

[flipjargendy]

My wife and I just purchased a refurbished MacBook last night. I have wanted a Mac for a long time since I found out they were UNIX based and now certified UNIX! Obviously, being a long time (moderately) Linux user, I plan on installing Linux apps.

Since I have not had a chance to play around with Macs too much I am wondering if OS X Leopard 10.5 compares to any distro(s). Is it more like a Debian-based distro or Redhat-based distro? I've had a chance to look at the root file structure (the layout of var, bin, etc... etc.) a bit and it only reminded me of Gentoo. That is probably because I only used Gentoo for a week.

I would like to know about this since I want to know what type of success people have had installing packages and RPMs.

Any input on experiences with the OS is much appreciated. I want to find out what type of problems/good experiences fellow Linux users have had on OS X Leopard 10.5.

Thanks for any input.

[coopstah13]

precompiled binaries and packages will not run on mac, they have to be compiled specifically for mac, you won't be able to install rpms or debs or whatever else, these are specific to linux distros

[flipjargendy]

I was wondering about that. I read that since the distro is certified UNIX it runs Linux apps. Hence, I planned on there being a little messing around with configurations.

[bigtomrodney]

Check out the Fink project

Fink - Home

It adds a package manager with Linux-centric apps available prebuilt for Mac. The downside of running X-based apps on Mac OS X is that the X that ships with it is fairly lame. It's generally a developer tool as far as I'm aware and native Mac apps don't use it (they use Quartz afaik).

Other than that you will have a bash terminal

[flipjargendy]

Thanks, I thought there must be something like Fink out there now that OS X is certified UNIX. I knew there had to be some other Linux fans out there like me who would buy a Mac and want to run Linux apps.

[Rubberman]

My wife's laptop is a PPC MacBook Pro, and she has an Intel-based MacBook Pro as well as a Linux workstation at work. She does a lot of porting to/from Mac and Linux. The GNU tools are certainly available for OSX, and as I understand it, most applications port fairly easily from Linux to the Mac, though as mentioned, they don't have the best X-Windows implementation to be found. Porting Mac applications to Linux is not much of a problem, provided the application isn't using Mac-specific GUI functions. If they use a third-party GUI toolkit, such as Qt, then porting GUI apps is pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, most Mac GUI apps don't go that route, unless they were intended to be multi-platform in the first place.

[techieMoe]

Thanks, I thought there must be something like Fink out there now that OS X is certified UNIX. I knew there had to be some other Linux fans out there like me who would buy a Mac and want to run Linux apps.

OS X is indeed certified UNIX, based on the BSD Mach kernel. It's a different beast from Linux, but the same GNU utilities are available for it.

[flipjargendy]

OS X is indeed certified UNIX, based on the BSD Mach kernel. It's a different beast from Linux, but the same GNU utilities are available for it.

BSD is actually what first came to mind when I played around with it. I knew it was BSD or Gentoo which it reminded me of.

Even if it is an entirely different beast it will still be fun. Now, I just have to be careful and not play around too much with it. My wife doesn't like sharing a computer with me because I am always messing around with settings and different apps.

[Rubberman]

My wife doesn't like sharing a computer with me because I am always messing around with settings and different apps.

Mine put a force field around hers. If I touch it, I'll get fried!