Apple's Darwin Evolves Apple's Darwin Evolves Paul Jones
Apple is putting the finishing touches on a new operating system that for the first time in the company's history will run natively on Intel-based systems.
Darwin is a stripped-down version of the MacOS X Server, which debuted in January 1999. Although the open-source Darwin announced a year ago is comprised of several of the core components of MacOS X, it does not include the popular Macintosh graphical user interface and will not run Mac applications.
"Wednesday, the whole thing compiled for the first time for both PowerPC and Intel," said Wilfredo Sanchez, lead engineer on the Darwin project, in a post to an Apple discussion list. "That's been my target for the past couple of months, and now I'm just ironing out details."
Sanchez didn't give a release date for the new operating system but said he is poised to start testing the installation process, which typically implies software has entered the final stages of development.
