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The most widely-distributed UNIX-based operating system, Mac OS X offers a unique combination of technical elements to the discerning geek, such as the fine-grained multithreading of the Mach 3.0 kernel, tight hardware integration and SMP-safe drivers, as well as zero configuration networking. Panther integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 5 into Darwin, the Open Source base of Mac OS X, to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability.
 Command-line environment UNIX users will quickly recognize the robust UNIX environment that underlies Mac OS X. That environment is accessible at any time from the Terminal application. You can also run commands that don’t require arguments (such as top) by double-clicking them in the Finder. With the thousands of man pages included in Mac OS X, you can quickly find all your favorite UNIX tools. UNIX utilities and scripting languages All of the standard UNIX utilities and scripting languages are included in Mac OS X: editors such as emacs, vim and pico; file management tools such as cp, mv, ls and gnutar; shell scripts including bash (the default shell), tcsh (csh) and zsh; and scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, tcl, Ruby and Python. Python users can also script the powerful Quartz compositing engine. Learn more in the Mac OS X for Unix Users technology brief. Universal libraries 
As part of Darwin, Mac OS X provides a robust set of optimized libraries, making it easy to port your existing UNIX code. A standard, multithreaded C library (libc) includes support for such capabilities as reentrant variants of standard functions (such as strtok_r), easing the porting of thread-aware applications to Mac OS X. POSIX API support, including POSIX thread signaling (such as pthread_kill, pthread_cancel) and I/O (such as pread/pwrite), allows you to easily port POSIX applications. Panther includes an in-kernel implementation of the asynchronous input/output APIs (aio_*) defined in the POSIX.4 standard, which simplifies porting of applications that receive input and output on different threads. This is particularly important for high-performance applications such as databases.
The wide character datatypes (wchar_t and others) are a standard way for UNIX scripts and programs to support non-Roman character sets such as Unicode, which may contain more than 8 bits per character. GNU libiconv is an open source, cross-platform version of iconv (the standard UNIX function for converting between different local text encodings), which also supports converting to and from Unicode. This is especially important for open source applications such as Samba that have added internationalization support. UNIX/Linux portability APIs, including System V semaphores, make it easy to port applications from System V-based versions of UNIX such as Linux and Solaris. Panther emulates the System V poll system call on top of BSD’s native select API, and the dlopen/dlclose dynamic library access routines — used with Executable and Linking Format (ELF) binaries on Linux, BSD, and other operating systems — on top of the native Mach-O format used on Mac OS X. With these routines available on Mac OS X, developers of cross-platform UNIX applications can port libraries and applications to Mac OS X with little or no change to their existing applications. X11 window system X11 for Mac OS X provides a complete X11 Window System as an optional installation for Panther, enabling Mac OS X to run UNIX GUI applications side by side with Cocoa, Carbon and Java applications. X11 for Mac OS X is a complete X11R6.6 implementation corresponding to XFree86 4.3, the same open source project used for X11 on Linux, BSD,and other UNIX-based systems. |
 
X11 for Mac OS X — Use legacy UNIX-based programs via the X11R6.6 X Windows display server integrated with Quartz compositor.FreeBSD 5 — Use the latest commands and libraries from the popular FreeBSD distribution. gcc 3.3 — Generate code using the latest C, C++, Objective-C open source compiler with optimizations for the G5 processor. Kerberized Safari — Browse Intranet networks with single-sign on. pstopdf command line tool — Convert PostScript Level 3 documents to PDF via command line tool. Updated UNIX man pages — Learn system command line tools more easily with significant update to collection of system man pages. Activity Monitor — Display processes, CPU, system memory, disk activity and networking status via new utility. Improved Terminal Application — Use command line tools via Terminal, now with improved emulation and double-byte encodings. Kerberized SMB, AFP, SSH, Mail — Use system services that support Kerberos single-sign on authentication tickets. Latest Scripting Languages — Use the best tool for the job by selecting from a full collection of UNIX scripting languages, such as Perl, PHP and Python, updated to latest versions. Rendezvous Browsing for ssh, sftp, ftp, telnet — Browse several UNIX connection protocols via Connect to Server in Terminal. Terminal Dock Menu — Create new shell, issue new command or connect to server directly from Dock. X11 Dock Menu — Activate X11 applications directly from the Dock icon. |
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