This past weekend I installed Mac OS X Public Beta and played around with it for a bit. I must say that it is an impressive operating system with a lot of rough edges. But it's magically to see Unix running under the Mac OS interface. The installation went smoothly on my PowerBook G3/233 which is the slowest G3 machine supported. It only took 10 minutes on a 4 GB empty partition.

For my purposes I was more interested in Mac OS X and its Unix utilities rather than on the Mac OS 9 compatibility layer. I couldn't get Mac OS 9 to load -- it would hang and take up 90% of the CPU until force-quitted. Not exactly unexpected as I have a finely tuned OS 9 installation with several networking extensions that load automatically. I hear that changing the extension set to Mac OS 9 only extensions works flawlessly and from there you can experiment with adding more extensions.

But as I said I wasn't concerned with running Mac OS 9. Still it was quite annoying to accidentally have Internet Explorer or myself launch a Mac OS 9 application, which starts the compatibility layer. So I deleted the application and that stopped it, though with the occassional application not found error. Speed-wise Mac OS X Beta is a bit slow especially the GUI layer which is built on top of a Postscript renderer. Snappy enough, but slower than native OS 9.

(Here let's stop for a little digression. I've read other OS X Beta reviews and the reviewers continue to treat the Beta like a final release. They complain about comparative speed and many changes which are still not in their final forms. It's unfair to compare a Beta to a finished product that has 20 years of refinement behind it. Frankly OS X looks like a winner, some people won't like the changes, oh well. But I don't think that most people will hate the new interface and the changes that this OS brings.)

There are a lot of BSD utilities included (look in /usr/lib). Emacs and vi and pico and ssh (now I don't have to use Thales to ssh to Soda). There is some sort of Apache installation that is the engine for Personal Web Sharing. There is also an ftp server but I don't know which one; the ftp server is also easy to enable from a control panel. Dave found sendmail on the system and started it up (it's a recent version). That's three of the four applications that I need for a server.

The only thing missing is a DNS server (BIND). There are also no development utilities or libraries installed. First I got a script to copy the dev utils from the Darwin distribution onto Mac OS X, but there were several files missing and a few other errors. Then I got the BIND distribution and tried to run make on it. Mac OS X is not a supported platform (actually, Mac OS X reports itself as Darwin). So I tried adding Darwin to the bsdos port and reran make. It went a little farther but still lots of errors. After a few hours of trying other things I gave up. I just don't know enough about compiling Unix programs and porting applications. I'll wait and hopefully someone else will compile BIND for Mac OS X (I did try to get a BIND package for Mac OS X Server and installing it but it didn't work -- the installer said this wasn't a Server installation).

So after this little experiment I have 3/4ths of what I need for my Mac OX X server setup. Apache I already know a bit, and ftp servers are relatively simple. BIND is not that hard if you're working off of a template. The hard one is Sendmail, although maybe a simple setup will be easy. But I've seen the Sendmail book O'Reilly published and that sucker's huge. Maybe I'll just use Mac OS 9 and my current server setup.