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zimv20

macrumors 601
Original poster
via an emulation layer on NetBSD.

article is here

NetBSD supported platforms are here

article text:

Emmanuel Dreyfus recently noted that progress has been made with NetBSD's Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer. Specifically, "WindowServer is able to talk with mach_init and it runs for quite a long time before crashing. Next steps are to fix the emulation bugs that cause WindowServer to crash, and then to re-implement enough of Darwin's IOKit to get WindowServer actually displaying something." (WindowServer being MacOS X's equivalent of an X server.)

According to the project's home page, "Once we will have a fully functionnal Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc (if that happens some day), we will just have to grab MacOS X libraries to run any MacOS X program, just like NetBSD is now able to run binaries from Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other OSes." Learn more about binary emulation with NetBSD here.
 
very interesting. somewhat like wine on pc linux. however, the only ppc computers capable of running osx would be some high end ibm servers and maybe yellowdog's "brick" (i'm not sure how they have it spelled) computers. if this project yielded promising results, there would be a lot of independent manufacturers cropping up that made ppc netbsd boxes.
 
Moving to Unix has just opened SO many possibilities.

When it comes down to it, what does it matter what processor is in the background, as long as it runs like a Mac should I am happy. I would be totally satisfied, though, if the case looked like a Mac, the software ran like a Mac and Apple was releasing new machines that were faster than the previous ones in regular intervals like they do.
 
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