[Group51]

Steve Jobs, during his talk about Panther mentioned that Apple would be putting lots of Linux APIs in to 10.3.

What does this mean, will it be easier to port Linux applications to Mac OS X, or just to Mac OS X via X11? Will these APIs be added to Cocoa or Carbon or what?

Perhaps it means Open Office will be native more quickly? I don't know.

Sorry, I'm not a programmer, but this has intrigued me.

[Millennium]

The APIs are mostly just there to make Linux apps easier to port. They won't be added to Cocoa or Carbon; I guess the closest thing would be the BSD subsystem. My guess is that they're trying to introduce a kind of multi-stage porting process. The idea is that you'dstart with your raw Linux/X11 app. Then you'd get it up and running on OSX/X11. Once that was done, you'd port it over to one of the native OSX GUI toolkits, and you would be done.

This isn't unprecedented; FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer. That's probably where the idea came from.

[Xeo]

Well it sounds to me like if the Linux APIs (assuming we're talking about X Window APIs) exist in OS X that Linux apps will compile and run in OS X as if it were any other OS X app. It also could mean that X11 is going to come pre-installed. But it'd be nice if it wasn't a separate app like that.

I really don't know though. I'm just guessing.

[suthercd]

X11 will be an integral part of Panther.

Craig

[Xeo]

Originally posted by suthercd:
X11 will be an integral part of Panther.

Craig

In what way? Is it going to run all the time? Start when we start an X11 app? Be pre-installed but we're forced to open it first?

[Gee4orce]

Panther will include the final release of Apple's X11 - I assume that just means it works the same way it does currently.

This is a different thing from the Linux APIs - I take that to mean that there will be Mac OS X equivalent versions of common Linux APIs.

For instance, I wanted to compile a web cam application called Motion. However, it relies on a Linux library called video4linux (or something similar) - so my compile failed. Presumably, if there was a Mac OS X API that aped this Linux one, this compile would work out of the box.

[Group51]

Originally posted by Gee4orce:
Panther will include the final release of Apple's X11 - I assume that just means it works the same way it does currently.

This is a different thing from the Linux APIs - I take that to mean that there will be Mac OS X equivalent versions of common Linux APIs.

For instance, I wanted to compile a web cam application called Motion. However, it relies on a Linux library called video4linux (or something similar) - so my compile failed. Presumably, if there was a Mac OS X API that aped this Linux one, this compile would work out of the box.

Right, so when you are writing an application, you don't need to use all the same type of API? I mean, you could use the Linux API to support the back-end, guts of the program and then program the UI using the fast cocoa tools?

This is like what Safari does right?

[Superchicken]

Hmmm iGIMP... I like the sound of that