Mac OS X/Darwin port of Wine

[Mike Hearn]

> Do you have any references for those statistics?

The figures came from this:

A few months ago (don't recall exactly when) Apple were under pressure
from Redmond to sell more copies of OS X so they could make the money
back on Office X. They revealed that 1 in 10 mac users were using OS X.
That's 0.4% of the worlds installed user base. That's probably gone up
somewhat by then, but I've been told recently by somebody who'd know
that the vast majority of Macs are still running OS 9.

Around a similar time (perhaps a few months earlier again) IDC estimated
(don't have a url handy sorry) that linux had roughly 2% of the desktop
market. Even if we assume that was generous That's still nearly 5x the
user base of MacOSX.

I don't really care one way or another, but just thought I'd point out
that you shouldn't make assumptions one way or another when nobody
really knows what's going on out there.

> I'm quite unlikely to set up a Linux/PPC box myself, although I am 
> *very* interested in hearing from folks working on Wine for *any* PPC 
> OS.

Hmm, is there any reason for that? Linux/PPC would seem the logical
place to start as WineLib already works on this platform, so the Bochs
integration would have a solid foundation to work on. As you've said,
raw Darwin (at least on x86) is more a showpiece than anything actually
useful, and that probably won't change for some time (if ever).

> I have been interested in ways to have Linux compatibility on Mac OS X 
> (it is a microkernel system after all), so I will spend a little time 
> investigating that.

For Linux binary support you'd have to do a FreeBSD style ABI export.
Considering that like 95% of the software available for it is open
source though, it's normally easiest to recompile fink-style.

Jeremy:
> I've been waiting oh so long for that to tick from 1% to 2%;
> that will signal the beginning of the desktop revolution to me.

It'll happen (google told me they basically trunc then balance the
numbers, but who knows how it's really calculated). Until then take
solace in the fact that Linux is the 4th most popular technology search
which beats Microsoft healthily :)

have fun!
-mike

-- 
Mike Hearn <m.hearn at signal.qinetiq.com>
QinetiQ - Malvern Technology Center