Darwin (operating system)

Darwin is a free, open source, Unix-like operating system first released by Apple Computer in 2000. It is also the core set of components upon which Mac OS X was developed.

In April 2002 the Internet Software Consortium and Apple founded OpenDarwin, a community to foster cooperative Darwin development. OpenDarwin creates its own releases of the Darwin OS. A notable subproject of OpenDarwin is DarwinPorts, which has the goal of assembling a next-generation collection of ports to Darwin.

The Darwin developers decided to adopt a mascot in 2000, and chose Hexley the platypus over other contenders, such as an Aqua Darwin fish, Clarus the dogcow, and an orca. Apple Computer does not sanction Hexley as a logo for Darwin.

Development and distribution

Quality control

Like most modern operating systems, Darwin employs a built-in kernel debugger to help the developers find kernel bugs.

License

In July 2003 Apple released Darwin under version 2.0 of the APSL license, which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved as a free software license. Previous releases had taken place under an earlier version of the APSL that did not meet the FSF's definition of free software, although it met the requirements of the Open Source Definition.

Releases

This is a table of Darwin releases with their dates of release and their corresponding Mac OS X releases. ^* Note that the corresponding Mac OS X release may have been released on a different date; refer to the OS X pages for those dates.

Date	Darwin release	Mac OS X release
March 16 1999	Darwin 0.1	Mac OS X Server 1.0
April 5 2000	Darwin 1.0
April 13 2000	Darwin 1.0.2	Mac OS X DP4
	Darwin 1.2.1	Mac OS X public beta
April 13 2001	Darwin 1.3.1	Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.0.4
October 2 2001	Darwin 1.4.1	Mac OS X 10.1
	Darwin 5.1	Mac OS X 10.1.1
	Darwin 5.2	Mac OS X 10.1.2
	Darwin 5.3	Mac OS X 10.1.3
	Darwin 5.4	Mac OS X 10.1.4
	Darwin 5.5	Mac OS X 10.1.5
September 23 2002	Darwin 6.0.1	Mac OS X 10.2
October 28 2002	Darwin 6.0.2	Mac OS X 10.2
	Darwin 6.1	Mac OS X 10.2.1
	Darwin 6.2	Mac OS X 10.2.2
	Darwin 6.3	Mac OS X 10.2.3
	Darwin 6.4	Mac OS X 10.2.4
	Darwin 6.5	Mac OS X 10.2.5
	Darwin 6.6	Mac OS X 10.2.6
	Darwin 6.7	Mac OS X 10.2.7
	Darwin 6.8	Mac OS X 10.2.8
October 24 2003	Darwin 7.0	Mac OS X 10.3
	Darwin 7.1	Mac OS X 10.3.1
	Darwin 7.2	Mac OS X 10.3.2
	Darwin 7.3	Mac OS X 10.3.3
	Darwin 7.4	Mac OS X 10.3.4
	Darwin 7.5	Mac OS X 10.3.5
	Darwin 7.6	Mac OS X 10.3.6
	Darwin 7.7	Mac OS X 10.3.7
	Darwin 7.8	Mac OS X 10.3.8
April 15 2005	Darwin 7.9	Mac OS X 10.3.9
April 29 2005	Darwin 8.0	Mac OS X 10.4
May 16 2005	Darwin 8.1	Mac OS X 10.4.1
July 12 2005	Darwin 8.2	Mac OS X 10.4.2
October 31 2005	Darwin 8.3	Mac OS X 10.4.3
January 10 2006	Darwin 8.4	Mac OS X 10.4.4
February 14 2006	Darwin 8.5	Mac OS X 10.4.5
April 3 2006	Darwin 8.6	Mac OS X 10.4.6

Notice that the version number jumps from Darwin 1.4.1 to 5.1. This was presumably done to continue the NEXTSTEP versioning (which left off at NEXTSTEP 3.3; the last release of OPENSTEP was 4.2).

Darwin free distribution projects

There are many projects aiming at building free operating systems based on the Darwin platform. The pioneer in this field is OpenDarwin, started in 2002.

Darwin enhancement projects

Due to the Free software nature of Darwin, there are many projects that aim to enhance the Operating system. Some of these projects focus on driver support, for example, wireless drivers such as a port of prism/prism2 or a port of ipw2200). Some focus on NIC (wired network cards), for example, a port of the tulip drivers (a driver for the ADMtek 985 clone and the PNIC 82c169 chipsets) or a port of the rlt8139 driver and the rtl8150lm driver (drivers for some RealTek cards). There are even ports of modem drivers, such as for ZyXEL modems, and a project for adding suport to card readers (compact flash or sd cards). Darwin also has support for ext2/ext3 filesystems ^*.

Others focus on software for running Windows software on Darwin (the darwine project, a port of Wine or for running Mac OS X/Darwin software on other Unix platforms such as FreeBSD (the RPM for darwin, pkgsrc (the NetBSD package manager), and Gentoo. Some of these operate in their own prefix so as not to interfere with the base system. Fink is also a well-known project to port unix programs to the darwin operating system. There is even a port of SELinux to Darwin [http://www.trustedbsd.org/sedarwin.html" target="_blank" >^*.

External links

General information

Documentation

Apple software | BSD | Free software operating systems | Mac OS X | Mach

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Darwin (operating system)