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Mac OS X AND *nix


mmk
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I was wondering if it is possible to use, let's say Gnome, and the X from Mac OS. That is... to use Gnome and run aqua applications.

That would be really cool, just like a Linux where you can run mac os x applications.

 

Any chance?

 

EDIT: If you install Gnome on a mac, is it possible to run Mac apps ? like Mail, iChat, iWeb etc... ?

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I think I still have an old screenshot somewhere that shows Gnome 1.2 running in Mac OS X 10.0 on my Pismo (PowerBook G3). That was back in 2001. Since Gnome is just a bunch of (mostly) portable Unix libraries and apps, and Mac OS X is (mostly) a Unix OS and has an optional X11 server, it is possible to run Gnome on Mac OS X, no Linux involved.

 

The story is different if you want to run Mac OS X apps (written against the Cocoa or Carbon APIs) on Linux with X11. The GnuStep project tries to make Cocoa applications do that, but it's not up to date with Apple's latest updates, so 99% of real-life Mac applications won't work with it. In fact, I'm not even sure if they're aiming for binary compatibility or just source-level compatibility. (In the latter case, it would be 100% apps that won't work.) And any app that uses the Carbon API (all of the Adobe and Microsoft portfolios, for example) won't run even if GnuStep reached their goal of chasing Apple.

 

In summary: no, you can't run Mac OS X applications "in pure Gnome" (taken as meaning "Linux or another free Unix OS with X11 and the Gnome desktop").

 

As for Xgl on Mac OS X, well, Apple's Quartz display engine already uses OpenGL for most of the hard work. Effects like Expose, the Dock fade-in, the Front Row fade-in, and in fact even the plain compositing of overlapping windows are rendered by the graphics hardware. Apple even makes this available through APIs so developers can add similar effects to their own apps. (Quicksilver and Virtue come to mind as examples.)

 

The X11 server shipped by Apple provides OpenGL support to apps, but AFAIK doesn't expose Xgl-style features. Of course you get the features outlined above for free, i.e. X11 windows have a shadow and take part in Expose, but there is no API for an X11 app to set the transparency of its own window or stuff like that.

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