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(Ted Harding) wrote:
The one question I know nothing about is the relationship between the Mac GUI and the Linux GUI (by which I mean X Windows, regardless of which window manager, such as GNOME/KDE, gets involved).
On two or more networked Linux boxes, provided all have X-capable applications installed and the one you're sitting at is actually running X, you can run any application on any box you're logged into, and have its display appear on your own screen as if you were sitting at the machine it's really running on.
I don't know at all whether the Mac's windows can be displayed in this way on a networked Linux box.
It would be great if it was possible. There have been solutions (sort of) to getting this to happen with Windows boxes cabled to Linux boxes (a sort of X emulation for Windows), so I should think that (a) it's possible on a Mac; (b) Apple have thought of it. But, if the ghetto is as closed as you suggest, Apple may not be encouraging it to happen!
Mac OS X's native window manager, Quartz, is completely independent of X11 and thus, AFAIK, you can't remote native OS X apps on a Linux box. However, OS X Tiger ships with a OS X version of X11, and you can, if you feel like it, run KDE or Gnome as the OS X window manager. Even without that drastic step you can still run Mac-installed X11-based apps easily enough (I run xterm, OpenOffice and The Gimp on my MacBook Pro, for example), and thus remote-run them from an external Linux box.
If you're interested in this sort of stuff, then I'd recommend the O'Reilly book "Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks" - it's a great source of info on subverting OS X to run more like Linux/Unix, especially when it comes to significant differences like the startup process (no init.d/rc.d), no real useradd and the alternative package managers Fink and DarwinPorts.
Hth, Simon
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