Operating System poll

[Evil Dave]

Esben Mose Hansen said:

One thing I really love about linux machines is that all software gets upgraded and maintained automatically. Does that work as well on Macs, or do you have to upgrade each piece of software manually (as on windows?)

Sorta. Automagic upgrading is by "vendor", so the updater for Apple's stuff is built into the system, FinkCommander does all the open source, Adobe has their own tool, etc.

I really wouldn't want to develop without the kernel sources and oprofile.

You can get kernel sources, and source for everything open source in Mac O/S, from:

http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html

You can't get sources for their GUI/window manager, or any other service they've written themselves.

AFAIK, nobody's ported oprofile to Mac O/S, but gprof seems to work fine for what I do. (I'm not sure if the PPC has the right hardware to support some of the fancier things oprofile does. Despite having an PPC Mac on my desk, I admit I don't know the architecture as well as x86, Itanium, MIPS, or ARM.)