I spent some time the last couple of days working on the new release of OpenDarwin 7.2.1 and it’s looking better and better. I have been experimenting with running it in Virtual PC on my Windows XP laptop.
The initial installation looks pretty good. Under Virtual PC I
was able to boot the CD .iso and proceed through the installation with
little effort. The .vhd “virtual hard disk” that was created was
much larger than other operating systems (>3GB!) however everything
seemed to work.
Upon rebooting, I did have one problem where the OS would hang for a
*long* time indicating that it was “Still waiting for root
device”. I went through the archives of the “hackers” mail list
and found a way around this … during boot I hit a key and entered
“rd=disk0s1 -v” to set the root device and verbose mode. This got
me past the problem and on to the next one … a shorter hang
initializing something with DNS … and then finally to a login
prompt. I ought to comment that I was able to make the “root
device’ definition “stick” by editing the file:
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist
and changing the text:
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>
to be:
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>rd=disk0s1</string>
I got this fix from another e-mail in the archives …
There still appears to be a networking problem with OpenDarwin
supporting the network interface card that is emulated by Virtual
PC. I had worked with Chuck Remes on this in the past, and I
think this is going to be a simple fix. Related to this, there
appears to be a DNS issue where the OS hangs for a bit during boot as
it attempts to initialize something with lookupd or netinfod …
I’m a little disappointed that in the distro they left out X … there
were too many other packages they wanted to include and so X is left
out as a RPM to install separately. It seems to me that X ought
to be there first, and then allow for the downloading of other
services. However I can see where this version is still oriented
towards the “server” market and the services are more important than
the GUI applications.
I’ll be posting more as I go along … I want to see just how quickly
Darwin and OpenDarwin continuet o advance. I believe that before
long we’ll have another OS that will stand up well beside Linux!