On 2004.8.22, at 12:28 AM, sigsegv@rambler.ru wrote:

> Herb Peyerl wrote:
>
>>
>> At work I have 5 monitors.  3 of them are NetBSD.  I have browsers on 
>> them (opera, konqueror and mozilla) and occasionally I
>> will encounter a website that won't render correctly in any of them.  
>> It renders just fine on Safari/OSX.    I'm tired of waiting for
>> the world to catch up to open source (and for open source to catch up 
>> to the world, in some cases); and I just want to get my
>> work done.

Should be able to get Flash running in Mozilla/Firefox/NS on Mac OS X 
without too much problem. (I should be able to say that more 
positively, but I tend to use Safari. After 10.0, I've been too lazy to 
load Firefox or Camino until the phiasco with unregistered protocols 
hit the phan a couple of months back.)

I've been playing with Java under Linux (RH/Fedora) at work, and I'm a 
bit amazed at how close that is to being as workstation/newbie useable 
as either Mac OS or MSWindows. As has been noted, Flash works on open 
source browsers in Linux. Haven't tried Flash with Opera on anything 
yet.

BTW, does anyone use Flash under NetBSD with Linux emulation?

> I don't know much about the history of Mac OS X, but I've read it was 
> based on open source BSD, tell me if I am wrong, but didn't they take 
> a free BSD, polished it, added pretty GUIs and packaged it as Mac OS 
> X? Mac OS X could be made up of 90% of open  sorce software! :-)

The simplified version of the story is that they put a Mach kernel in 
FreeBSD, then wrapped NeXT over that to get Mac OS X alpha. When Mac OS 
X went beta, they packaged the open source parts (kernel+*nix tools) 
and released the package as Darwin. Much of the work through Panther 
was pulling the best of the old Mac OS into the new one, but they've 
left most of the UI elements and the new stuff like iTunes and 
garageBand as closed source. The don't work as hard as we wish they 
would to unencumber things.

So, there is a new "BSD" called Darwin, which is strongly FreeBSD 
flavored, but borrowes heavily from NetBSD and some from OpenBSD, and 
is the workhorse underneath Mac OS X. Some people run X11 on Darwin 
x86, from what I hear, but it's not Mac, of course.

--
Joel Rees
     Complaining about systems that are incomplete misses the point.
     In this world, a system can't be perfect and useful at the same 
time.
     Of course, there's no excuse for refusing to fix problems --
     we'll never run out of problems.