Can it run OSX? Lol

[pandapi]

Gotcha!

Anyway, in all seriousness, is there a OSX-like dock that will work with the lightweight LXDE desktop environment?

I see docky seems to be in the debian repositories but i'm unsure as to whether that means it will work with LXDE.

How about getting the menubars up in the top bar like OSX or the later versions of ubuntu running gnome/unity. Is that possible in LXDE?

Thanks

[hunternet93]

I was all ready to explain the difference between CPU architectures after I saw the title .

I just installed Docky on my Debian system running XFCE. It works, although I get a warning that it might be buggy since I don't have a compositing (i.e Compiz) window manager running. Both LXDE and XFCE are GTK based, so Docky should work on LXDE, although performance might not be great on the Pi.

About having menus at the top: A quick Google search didn't find anything, so I would guess it's not possible without editing LXDE's code.

[pandapi]

hunternet93 said:


I was all ready to explain the difference between CPU architectures after I saw the title .

I just installed Docky on my Debian system running XFCE. It works, although I get a warning that it might be buggy since I don't have a compositing (i.e Compiz) window manager running. Both LXDE and XFCE are GTK based, so Docky should work on LXDE, although performance might not be great on the Pi.

About having menus at the top: A quick Google search didn't find anything, so I would guess it's not possible without editing LXDE's code.


Thanks. Yeah, i did a bit of a search but didn't find much.

I'm guessing compiz won't work on the Pi, at least to begin with. Is that all tied in with the GPU accelerated X?

Its probably something that isn't worth bothering with to be honest. But it would be a nice to have, for me at least.

Cheers

[Nr90]

I think Plank might work nicely. Lightweight and good functionality.

AWN is also pretty but not as lightweight.

[pandapi]

Interesting, not seen plank before. Seems to be very gnome orientated. Worth a try though. Thanks

[SimplyRyan]

as for the global menu (application menus in the top panel) I'm working on that right now. There are essentially two methods to achieve this end; 1) being the impossible task of incorporating Ubuntu's downstream patches to GTK and the dbus based menu architecture used by the modified gnome libraries in Unity (NOT GONNA HAPPEN) or 2) the method I'm pursuing, installing Xfapplet which allows use of Gnome2 panel applets in XFCE4, and then using the gnome2-globalmenu panel applet. I'm now on hour 5 of compilation and dependency hell, but when I finish (assuming I am successful) I'll post up some .debs. Or since not everyone is running Debian on their pi, probably just a tar of the precompiled mess of code.

[SimplyRyan]

another thought occurred to me; you could install MATE desktop. Not as light as XFCE or LXDE, but it is certainly manageable on a Pi, particularly if you overclock. That whole bit about enabling compositing though might be a deal breaker. I know for my experience that Docky can be installed on the Pi, but it fails to start.
Plank for the record is a fork of Docky. As far as I know, Docky is no longer maintained and the coding efforts were rolled into Plank by the devs of ElementaryOS, which is still under active development but one of their main devs, Am Monkey (the genius behind Nautilus Elementary/Marlin) has lost all interest in the project. Under the best of circumstances, the last several builds of Docky were unstable to say the least.

[hexameron]

Stop laughing right now, and point your browser at : http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-108/

There /might/ be bits that would run on a raspberry pi.

[SimplyRyan]

Are you referring to the open source Darwin portions of the OS? if so, then yes Darwin could in theory be ported to the Pi but outside of forming the "UNIX" underpinnings of OSX, Darwin is largely defunct and even in it's heyday offered nothing to the Open Source community that Linux and BSD didn't already do better except maybe offer a glimpse of how OSX works underneath all that Cocoa and Aqua stuff. OSX without the beautiful GUI or awesome creative software... no thanks. That being said, as a Hackintosher myself, I've grown pretty keen on the clever organization of an OSX system with applications being packaged up neatly in .app containers and drivers being organized by .kext files.

[hexameron]

I was surprised to learn that Apple release any Source at all, but if someone had a lot of time on their hands it might be worth looking at. Since I know nothing about Apple I will shut up now.

[james968]

OS X is based on one of the BSD's so you could see if they are available for the ARM.

As per the Dock, have you looked into GNuSTEP?

[Grumpy Mike]

Well RISC OS was way ahead of it's time and OSX now looks a lot like it. You can try it out on the Pi even tough it is still in alpha. It fits nicely into a 4Mb SD card with lots of space for storing stuff.

[SimplyRyan]

I was surprised to learn that Apple release any Source at all, but if someone had a lot of time on their hands it might be worth looking at. Since I know nothing about Apple I will shut up now.

Apple doesn't release source code. The open source portions of OSX are built upon the modified BSD project called "Darwin". Darwin serves as the core of OSX, but the similarities to a proper posix environment end as soon as the GUI is enabled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
Large portions of free software on OSX can be installed using Fink or Macports, but they utilize the Xserver which is slow and clunky and uses additional RAM and CPU on top of the proprietary Aqua GUI.
As far as porting OSX to the Pi, it's simply not possible. The open source portions could technically be, but the rest of the OS that is comprised of proprietary code could not. Not without internal development by Apple, and since I don't think Apple is interested in make ANYTHING that only costs $35 that is simply not going to happen.