Apple Updates Darwin, Opens Rendezvous

Darwin 6.0.1, the BSD UNIX operating system that serves as the core of Mac OS X v10.2, was released Wednesday under Apple's ongoing open source initiative. Along with Darwin, Apple opened the source code to Rendezvous, the company's automatic network discovery technology that made its first appearance in Jaguar and iChat.

"Rendezvous is a major innovation in IP networking that creates dynamic networks of computers, devices and software applications with zero user configuration," said Apple senior vice president Philip Schiller in Wednesday's announcement. "By supporting an open standards process and providing open source software that is available today, Apple is encouraging the rapid adoption of Rendezvous technology.

Developers including HP, Canon and Philips have already announced their support for new the technology. AOL has also implemented Rendezvous in internal test versions of its AIM client viewed by BetaNews.

Available for both PowerPC and x86 architectures, Darwin 6.0.1 adds enhancements from FreeBSD 4.4 and the KAME IPv6/IPsec code. Darwin can be downloaded as source code or in binary form.

"Darwin 6.0.1 features improved support for POSIX threads and adds several reentrant C library functions, as well as numerous new and updated libraries including ncurses, bzip, and SASL. Darwin now uses bash as the default /bin/sh, and adds python and ruby as scripting languages," a note on Apple's Darwin developer site reads.