[TriLUG] Bought my first Laptop--a new Apple Powerbook with OSX--With Linux software in mind I have three questions:

[John Franklin]

On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 01:46:46AM -0400, al johson wrote:
> I just bought myself a new Mac Titanium Powerbook 667MHZ G4. I'm curious
> whether Linux software can be transferred from Linux to Apple's OSX system
> (which as you may recall is a version of BSD).
> 
> 1. Specifically, are there any cross compilers which can take Linux source
> code and turn it into programs that will run on Apple's OSX system??

As I'm sure you've noted the cc that ships on the development tools disk is
based on 2.95.2.  It has some additional flags, in particular the -framework 
flag, to deal with the OS Xisms.  (Frameworks are like shared libraries but
with headers, localization strings, and versioning all wrapped up in a neat
package.)

That said, some of the apps you're looking for may be recompiled already.
Check out http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx and do a search for a couple
of them.  While you're there do a search for XDarwin and OroborOSX.  The
former is XFree for OSX, the latter is a window manager that looks like
Aqua.

> Incidentally, I've discovered that O'Reilly's new OSX book (in the missing
> manual series) has a super intro to using the Terminal in OSX for beginners.

Yes, it is a fantastic book series.  When my father went up to OS X, I got him
a copy of the OSX Missing Manual book.

> I'm told many people consider it better than other attempts to do this for
> LINUX, which raises a second question:
> 
> 2. How portable are Terminal "programs" or "scripts"  between Linux and
> OSX??? For example, how many similarities are there between the commands in
> OSX and Linux??

The binaries are not, but most of the tools will build (sometimes with some
tweaks to the Makefiles or code.)

> Finally, I have one last question:
> 
> 3. If I wanted to put a version of LINUX on this laptop, which version would
> everyone recommend???

Darwin.  I doubt you would buy a Mac to run something you could run on cheap
PC hardware.  That said, I tend to run NetBSD on old Mac hardware.  Not 
really for the newbie, though.

jf
-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: 35°43'56"N 78°53'27"W