Unix users to be ‘major beneficiaries’ of Panther

Unix users will be “major beneficiaries” of Panther, the next major rev of Mac OS X, Apple software product manager Darren Sng said at this week’s Australian Unix and Open Systems User Group (AUUG) conference at Sydney’s Duxton Hotel. LinuxWorld reports that Panther will be bundled with an optional, optimized version of X11, the X window system for graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

X11 for Mac OS X, introduced in January, enables applications based on the X11 windowing environment to run side-by-side with native Mac OS X applications on the same desktop. It’s commonly used on Unix platforms.

“With this you can access open source applications like Open Office and others,” Sng said. He also stated that Mac OS X suited Unix users thanks to its support for languages like Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP. An X11 software development kit will be available, and will also help developers that port from Linux, he added. LinuxWorld also reports that:

Panther is synchronized with FreeBSD’s NFSv3.

The Panther kernel will be synchronized with BSD 4.8.

Panther will support IPv6.

Unix and Linux APIs (application programming interfaces) like POSIX AIO, poll and dlopen have been added.

Apple says Panther is due before the end of the year.