Comparing Apples and Penguins

By Moshe Bar

October 28, 2002

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Last month, I described my romance with Mac OS X as a near-perfect environment for the desktop, and/or laptop. The harmonious combination of Apple GUI know-how with Unix (FreeBSD) for stability, security and efficiency are too sweet for geeks from all walks of life. I continue to use Apple laptops (I now have both the iBook and the Apple G4) for my writing, teaching and speaking activity. We received tons of reader's email here at Byte.com in response to that column. Too many to be named here rightly corrected me: Contrary to my first impression, there is indeed a package manager for OS X. It's called Fink and you can find it on www.sf.net/projects/fink. It also turned out that the Jaguar version I had received was a pre-release CD which contained only the 2.95 gcc compiler, though many reported that the 3.1 version of the same compiler was installed by default, as well. Apple quickly reacted by sending me the released version of Jaguar and, in fact, both compilers are present.

As good as Mac OS X is for desktops and laptops, one wonders if the FreeBSD inside is not too restricted by the Apple jacket around it to also make for an efficient, secure and fast server OS. Apple is now busy convincing the world that Apples make also for excellent server appliances in the handy U1 format, thanks to OS X. That new product is called Apple Xserve. Many potential buyers are, however, asking themselves if OS X—given its recent introduction—is ready today to handle their critical apps.

That's why I decided to take one of these sleek Xserve boxes and test run it both under OS X and under Linux. I was loaned an Xserve for a week by a geek friend of mine over at a very large ISP. That machine came with Dual 1Ghz PowerPC G4 and 1 GB of Ram. I installed OS X from scratch on it using the CDs that come along with the product. The resulting OS after the install has version 10.1.5. The included AGP 4X card with 64 MB of dedicated graphics RAM is a screamer.

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