In January when I began to study in the university I decided to use MacOS because it allows me to suspend-to-ram – a feature that works only unreliable or not at all on a Linux macbook. Now after working with it for more than a month and joining Gentoo/MacOS I realize that it has been a good choice after all. With Crossover Mac I am able to play Counter Strike with my fellow students. Nowadays gtk+ and qt4 are both available in Native versions for MacOS and most of the basic tools from Linux also work on a Mac.
Native versions of qt4 and gtk+ means that they work without X11 – the need for an additional application is eliminated and qt4 apps look much better becaude they put the menu in the top bar and adhere to the OSX design. Bringing applications over to MacOS and compiling them is fun – and it is a joy every time when something worked and can be copied over to the prefix overlay.
Working with the prefix overlay is fun because it is svn and not cvs like the Gentoo-x86 repository. repoman works on svn here and it is so amazingly fast on svn.
Everything is installed with user privileges in EPREFIX=/Users/stefan/Library/Gentoo. $EPREFIX/usr/bin is added to the path so that I can just run eix-sync as user. Here you can see some output of eix-sync, some error messages including the EPREFIX, the native qt4 application kboard for playing chesss via FICS and gimp on a native gtk+ – all installed by emerge in the prefix. You can also see iTerm and Safari on the screenshot.
Nice 🙂
Why not give us some bigger screenshot ? Specialy iTerm is interesting 🙂
I happen to have 2 macs (ppc) one is dual booting OX and linux [effectively that’s a linux only machine] and one is left on OS X.
I tried to put gentoo on OS X, and I have had a mixed success (about 3 months ago) the main problem is that I couldn’t access the svn behind the university firewall. Some svn servers seem to be set up in a peculiar way in regards to firewalls, the sunrise and prefix svn don’t work, the gentoo-sciences overlay svn does work. Until this is solved I am at a halt using gentoo on OS X.
Did you know there are patches to get gtk+ to use the mac os menubar. Not sure if it is just a “make linux look like mac” or a real “fit linux in mac os” patch but it might be worth looking at. (can be found on gnomefiles.org)