[geeks] Mac definitions (was: Smart phone data usage)

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, 7 Jul 2011, Mark Benson wrote:

> On 7 Jul 2011, at 17:23, Michael Parson <mparson at bl.org> wrote:
>
>> MacOS X - The whole Mac Operating Environment
>>
>> Darwin - The underlying kernel for the OS (think SunOS 2.10 vs Solaris 10).
>>
>> Carbon - the MacOS API from MacOS 8/9 days, OS X supported some bits of it
>>         but it has since been replaced with Cocoa
>>
>> Cocoa - The current MacOS API
>>
>> Quartz - Graphics layer for Mac OS X
>>
>> Core Audio/Video/Animation/etc - low-level APIs for those varous subsystems
>>
>> Finder - The UI, the graphical shell, what Apple calls "The Macintosh
>>     Desktop Experience," the rough equiv of Windows' Explorer
>>     (not IE, but explorer.exe).
>>
>> My examples don't line up 100%, but should give you a rough idea of
>> where the bits fit together.
>
> Holy crap on a stick I just had a major flashback to about 7 years ago and one
> of Dan Knight's LowEndMac mailing lists trying to explain OS X to yet another
> OS9 loving zealot who couldn't get their head around a real (or at least
> better at any rate) UNIX based OS.

That stack is hardly unique to MacOS.

RHEL/SuSE/Fedora/Ubuntu/Debian/Etc - The Whole Operating Environment

Linux - The kernel

GTK/QT/Motif/yadda yadda yadda - Toolkits and APIs

X11 - Graphics layer

esound/alsa -  lower-level APIs for sound, I'm sure there are equivs for video or others

KDE/CDE/Gnome - The UI, the graphical shell...  Though I think this gets
even fuzzier, since you can replace the UI under GNOME, so, it might
even be at a different layer.

> I think I need a lie down :P

Me too. </aol>

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org
Austin, TX
KF5LGQ