Hey,

does anybody know of a way of running mac applications under linux? maybe not through an emulator - similar to wine? is it possible?
cheers.

No way.
It`s only possible to install osx in a virtual machine on Linux (vmware/qemu-kvm)
If you would go that way use KVM its performed much better than vmware.

ok - thx for the info. but do you know why it wouldn't work? I would have thought it would be easier than running DOS apps since OS X and linux are both unix based.

here's an interesting thread on slashdot about it that i just found. seems to be many problems but still some hope...

No hope for me,
its the same thing as wine (reverse engeneering the hole api). But windows has a larger user base and it doesnt work really only for some simple apps.
There are a lot linux driver that are not ported to osx and thats really simple in most cases ,so why should someone this hard work

Things are a lot more complicated than that.

For a clue as to how, google "GNUstep."

If you're referring to Wine then it does tend to work for things a lot more complex than that - a lot of people play World of Warcraft via Wine and it works fine.

That said, as of now if you want something similar to Wine for running Mac apps then you're pretty much SOL. It could be done in the same way that Wine was done (effectively, you'd have to reverse engineer and duplicate the Carbon, Cocoa, and likely a few other API's), but hasn't been yet. One could certainly start such and endeavour, but honestly, Wine has taken dozens of programmers the YEARS (possibly past a decade now) to get to the point that it's at. It's not really a simple process.

As bofors said, GNUstep exist, it is the open source version of NeXtStep, the base of OSX. The cocoa API is mostly (~75%) there and few other libs also exist. Under that, Apple use GNU tools, the same as Linux use (GCC, G++, autotools, binutils). To get mac apps to compile in Linux, you have to rewrite Quartz, CoreImage, the remainning part of Cocoa, core animation, interface coreAudio using pulseAudio and rewrite 5-10 other libs. Then apps will need to be recompiled to use XLib and not the propriatary display framework of OSX. After that, they will run native on Linux, like any other Linux apps.

Cocoa is only for Mac
Forget a "wine" for it

If you just need portbility use Gtk or Qt