Running The Last Open Source Apple OS Release On A Mac Mini (Darwin 8.0.1)

[alex_free]

Wikipedia page

Archived Apple Downloads of Darwin releases.

Darwin is the open source version of Mac OS X, without the closed source parts (besides drivers).

From 2000-2005 Apple released various Darwin ISO images upon which were released alongside Mac OS X.

The very last version Apple released was 8.0.1, on par with Tiger.

The great thing about Darwin is it ran on x86, and any ppc Mac that officially supported the contemporary Mac OS X release also fully supported Darwin.

Below are some images of the Darwin 8.0.1 installation process on my Mac mini.

At the login prompt it proudly declares “Darwin/BSD”. The install program reminds me somewhat of modern OpenBSD

 

[RogerWilco6502]

Amazing! Thank you for compiling this information!

 

[Amethyst1]

The newer versions of Darwin 8.x.x were released as source only, so the next step(s) would be to compile these and get 8.0.1 up to snuff. Xorg would also be nice The PureDarwin project had a few releases based on Darwin 9.x.x but they were all x86-only.

EDIT:

Fullscreen Command Line Mode (OS X -NoGUI)

I'm not sure how well known this little trick is, but if you're looking to run a regular installation of OS X as a GUI-less CLI, with none of the bells and whistles of Aqua, Cocoa and the rest of it, then you can run the Darwin/BSD underpinnings standalone. This can result in a huge improvement...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[RogerWilco6502]

The newer versions of Darwin 8.x.x were released as source only, so the next step(s) would be to compile these and get 8.0.1 up to snuff. Xorg would also be nice The PureDarwin project had a few releases based on Darwin 9.x.x but they were all x86-only.

EDIT:

Fullscreen Command Line Mode (OS X -NoGUI)

I'm not sure how well known this little trick is, but if you're looking to run a regular installation of OS X as a GUI-less CLI, with none of the bells and whistles of Aqua, Cocoa and the rest of it, then you can run the Darwin/BSD underpinnings standalone. This can result in a huge improvement...

forums.macrumors.com

What would be required to compile them for PPC? I'm not all that good with compiling from source, but if it's a matter of hitting a button and letting it run I'd be happy to donate the processing power of my PPC machines.