TODO - heldersrvio/PureDarwin GitHub Wiki
This page lists (from higher to lower layers, but non exhaustively) some of the areas where work is needed to make Darwin tends to the truly world-class OS it should be.
Would you like to help out with PureDarwin? Don't know where to start?
Feedback is "crucial", whatever the form it takes, from the container to the content including the way of sending it.
If you've got PureDarwin to run somewhere - either in a VM we don't know about, or on a real piece of hardware - then please let us know so that we can add it to our compatible hardware page.
With the X window system up and running, PureDarwin becomes a very compatible BSD clone, meaning that it should run any of the wide range of software available for that platform. As an example, most of the pure binaries compiled through the MacPorts project can easily be copied and used into a PureDarwin release. Let us know what you got running.
Truly much appreciated if the critics are a bit (not literally) "constructive".
Help us to improve several legal aspects, including non exhaustively how to handle intellectual property, trademarks, patents, copyright and licenses. What to provide? Where? How?
The basic Darwin system as provided by Apple is made up of over 400 different packages. Many of these have been included in releases of PureDarwin (Xmas and Nano). Many more are available from http://src.macosforge.org. And they all need testing. We know this method is empiric but we simply need to know what works, and (more importantly) what doesn't, so that we can focus our efforts there.
A particular interest at the moment is per example the high level web application stack: Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or lighttpd, rrdtool and postgresql, etc..). That also could be the other scripting languages as Python, Perl, Ruby... or also some more low level behavior via the use of DTrace per example. We haven't had a chance to put them through their paces yet, so maybe you could try them and let us know.
Not every Darwin project is available as a pre-built binary root. There's a list of these 'missing' packages (about 80 in all) in the git repository (under projects/PureDarwinPackageDatabase/PackageLists in the file missing.txt). Some of these are known not to build. Others are untested. If you succeed in building them, let us know so we can host a copy of the binary root for others and make them available for testing.
Like all operating systems, Darwin will live or die by its hardware support. There are a great many IOKit device drivers created by Apple and 3rd parties available. We first need to collect a list together, so that they can be tested and then bundled with future versions of PureDarwin.
Notes: See the Network page, the KEXTs page, the Graphics page, the Binary drivers page, the ZFS page, etc...
This is a crucial mission. In case the previous item wasn't enough for you! Even pulling together all of the 3rd party drivers available, there will still be plenty of unsupported hardware. And we also have the problem of device drivers which are available in OS X but which haven't been made available for free redistribution in any form by Apple (e.g., the e1000 support via AppleIntel82454XEthernet driver springs instantly to mind). So if you have the skills in this area, why not roll up your sleeves and get stuck in?
The goal of this project is to make Darwin more usable by providing an installation ISO, documentation, and add-on software. You are welcome to join #puredarwin on irc.freenode.net or the Gitter chat if you would like to join PureDarwin development and to add to this site.
The Wiki pages were recently moved from Google Sites and in the conversion process some formatting was lost. Please help fixing the markdown of this page by editing it. But please delete nothing, especially not (broken) images; fix them instead (see the main page of the Wiki for an example).