All Things Microsoft > Microsoft Software
Windows XP or Mac OS X?
voidmain:
quote:Originally posted by gump420:
Oh, believe me, I've tried; you can't do it with OS X. If you install Linux, Darwin, or some other OS, then sure you can get a prompt-only screen, but you can't do that with any version of Mac OS (especially not OS 9 or prior, which didn't even have a prompt in any way, shape, or form).
Part of the reason for this is that Macintosh computers do not have a "text mode" for the display in the same way that PCs do; you can display fullscreen text, but it's not just a standard screen mode for the computer.
--- End quote ---
Hmmm, what's the equivelant of the '/etc/inittab' file and 'init' program in Darwin, if there is an equivelant? I assume Darwin boots first and then spawns the GUI after all the Darwin stuff is initiallized. Sure if they took all the video modes out of the Darwin kernel (or never created any, along with termcap/terminfo files for video/keyboard) for the Mac's video card I can see how you couldn't bring up a text based tty, however what's stoping someone from writing a very tiny graphical/windowing environment that will only spawn a few shells (microwindows comes to mind for things like PDAs) and replacing the original call to start the GUI with a call to start this. You should be able to do this in very little memory.
The only problem I can see is that they changed the init environment to some proprietary binary format. Hopefully the GUI is at least are separate binaries and possibly replacing them with the microwindows binaries. This would get around the binary init (if it's binary). Would make it much more difficult. I wish I had one to play with. I'm going to do some searching around for info on this (Darwin/OSX/init). I'm sure you've already done this though...
[ January 27, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
voidmain:
Gump, what do you get when you hold down "Cmd-v" on boot? According to http://www.darwinfo.org/faq.shtml#verbboot you should get the text based initialization info during startup before the GUI starts. You can also add "-v" to the boot-args in the firmware. If you get text here then I would think you can get text by spawning a Mac compatible getty/login in place of the GUI. Of course if it doesn't work how do you recover? It also says you can boot into single user mode by holding down "Cmd-s" during boot. Does this single user mode start the GUI?
[ January 27, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
gump420:
Well, I'll play around a bit and let you know; however, when Mac OS X boots it goes into a graphical mode before even loading the kernel. And I'm pretty certain Darwin has a different booting procedure than OS X.
Okay, I tried "Cmd-v" and that showed a few screens of text messages as the kernel loaded up and as other devices started; however, that may or may not mean I can get straight to a text login. It still depends on how the rest of the boot procedure works, which is something I still need to play around with.
[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: gump420 ]
CommonSense:
OK, let me clarify all this, since I'm on an OS X box right now.
Holding down command-V while you start up is "verbose mode," meaning you see text instead of the GUI -- but this is just during the bootup process. When you get to the point of login, it snaps right back into the GUI again.
However, at the login prompt, you can enter ">console" (without the quotes) as the username and hit enter, and poof -- the GUI's killed and you're in text mode, with a login prompt (from which you log in normally), and there you go. You're in text mode until you log out.
OS X isn't meant to be a server OS, although it can be used as one pretty effectively. OS X Server is meant for that. And on a fast enough box, the GUI isn't going to eat many cycles, especially while the console sits unattended (as is the case with the typical server machine).
voidmain:
It won't take up many cycles as long as the screen saver isn't running (unless you just use a blank screen screen saver). It does take up a certain amount of memory though even though memory is cheap these days. Point is, you wouldn't run it on a server. There's no reason you would need OSX server if all you want to do is run Apache, Sendmail, DNS, etc.. Just grab all the sources and install them, then you would have yourself an OSX internet server (or Darwin Internet server if you wish).
So it does indeed sound like it will run in text mode (if you wanted to). And I'll bet you can very easily change the /etc/rc (or similar) to not even load OSX if you wanted. That article I linked to mentioned how the "init" process works.
Having said that, it would be a waste of a good desktop machine. It would be wiser to just get a cheap PC and run Linux or FreeBSD on it for that kind of stuff.
[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
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