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Run Mac Apps On Windows
Linux users who want to run Windows applications without switching operating systems have been able to do so for years with Wine, software that lets apps designed for Windows run on Unix-like systems.
There has been no robust equivalent allowing Mac applications to run on Linux, perhaps no surprise given that Windows is far and away the world's most widely used desktop operating system. A developer from Prague named Luboš Doležel is trying to change that with 'Darling,' an emulation layer for OS X.
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- Short Answer: Mac OS is NOT Linux. That’s why you can’t run MAC Apps on Linux. Long Answer: It is based on UNIX, in that it conforms to POSIX Architecture Standards, just like Linux and BSD. POSIX stands for Portable Operating System Interface for.
Install Mac On Linux
'The aim is to achieve binary compatible support for Darwin/OS X applications on Linux, plus provide useful tools that will aid especially in application installation,' Doležel's project page states. Darwin is Apple's open source operating system, which provides some of the backend technology in OS X and iOS. The name 'Darling' combines Darwin and Linux. Darling works by 'pars[ing] executable files for the Darwin kernel... load[ing] them into the memory... and execut[ing] them.'
But there is a ways to go. 'Darling needs to provide an ABI-compatible [application binary interface] set of libraries and frameworks as available on OS X... by either directly mapping functions to those available on Linux, wrapping native functions to bridge the ABI incompatibility, or providing a re-implementation on top of other native APIs,' the project page notes.
Doležel, who started Darling a year ago, described the project and its progress in an e-mail interview with Ars. Darling is in the early stages, able to run numerous console applications but not much else. 'These are indeed the easiest ones to get working, albeit 'easy' is not the right word to describe the amount of work required to achieve that,' Doležel said. 'Such applications include: Midnight Commander, Bash, VIM, or Apple's GCC [GNU Compiler Collection]. I know it doesn't sound all that great, but it proves that Darling provides a solid base for further work.'
Users must compile Darling from the source code and then 'use the 'dyld' command to run an OS X executable,' Doležel said. One roadblock is actually getting Mac .dmg and .pkg application files working on a Linux system. Because doing so isn't that straightforward, Doležel said, 'I've written a FUSE module that enables users to mount .dmg files under Linux directly and without root privileges. An installer for .pkg files is underway.'
Unix/Linux synergy
The fact that OS X is a Unix operating system provides advantages in the development process. 'This saved me a lot of work,' Doležel explained. 'Instead of implementing all the 'system' APIs, it was sufficient to create simple wrappers around the ones available on Linux. I had to check every function for ABI compatibility and then test whether my wrapper works, so it wasn't as easy as it may sound.'
Another lucky break not available to Wine developers is that Apple releases some of the low-level components of OS X as open source code, 'which helped a lot with the dynamic loader and Objective-C runtime support code,' Doležel noted.
But of course, the project is an extremely difficult one. Doležel isn't the first to try it, as Darling was initially based on a separate project called 'maloader.' Doležel said he heard from another group of people 'who started a similar project before but abandoned the idea due to lack of time.'
Doležel was actually a novice to OS X development when he started Darling, being more familiar with OS X from a user's perspective than a developer's perspective. 'I have personally looked for something like Darling before, before I realized I would have to start working on it myself,' he said.
Darling relies heavily on GNUstep, an open source implementation of Apple's Cocoa API. GNUstep provides several core frameworks to Darling, and 'the answer to 'can it run this GUI app?' heavily depends on GNUstep,' Doležel said. Doležel is the only developer of Darling, using up all his spare time on the project.
No reverse-engineering
Doležel isn't reverse-engineering Apple code, noting that it could be problematic in terms of licensing and also that 'disassembling Apple's frameworks wouldn't be helpful at all because Darling and the environment it's running in is layered differently than OS X.'
The development process is a painstaking one, done one application at a time. Doležel explains:
To improve Darling, I first take or write an application I'd like to have running. If it is someone else's application, I first examine it with one of the tools that come with Darling to see what frameworks and APIs it requires. I look up the APIs that are missing in Apple's documentation; then I create stub functions for them and possibly for the rest of the framework, too. (Stub functions only print a warning when they are called but don't do any real work.)
The next step is to implement all the APIs according to the documentation and then see how the application reacts. I also add trace statements into important functions to have an insight into what's happening. I believe this is very much like what Wine developers do.
When things go wrong, I have to use GDB [GNU Debugger] to debug the original application.
It is rather unfortunate that Apple's documentation is often so poorly written; sometimes I have to experiment to figure out what the function really does. Many OS X applications seem to contain complete pieces of example code from Apple's documentation, presumably because one would have to spend a lot of time getting to understand how the APIs interact. This is why I appreciate open source so much—when the documentation is sketchy, you can always look into the code.
Years of development are needed. Similar to Wine, 'Having a list of applications known to be working is probably the best way to go,' Doležel said.
Darling should work on all Linux distributions, he said, with the catch that 'many apps for OS X are 32-bit only, and installing 32-bit packages on a 64-bit Linux system could be tricky depending on your distribution. I personally use Gentoo Linux, so I'm gradually creating a Portage overlay that would compile Darling and all dependencies for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.'
Doležel would like to bring Angry Birds, other games, and multimedia applications to Linux. Darling could potentially 'be used to run applications compiled for iOS,' he writes on the project site. This will also be a challenge. 'The intention is to support the ARM platform on the lowest levels (the dynamic loader and the Objective-C runtime),' he writes. 'Rewriting the frameworks used on iOS is a whole different story, though.'
Fox Telemetry Decoder
The Fox Telemetry Decoder is being released to demodulate, store and analyze telemetry data from AMSAT’s Fox series of Cube Sats. We hope that you will also upload the telemetry you receive to the AMSAT server so that it can be used by other Amateur Scientists and our research partners, whose experiments fly with the Fox satellites.
FoxTelem is experimental. We are sure it can be improved. Please provide feedback and suggestions
Run Windows On A Mac
Fox-1 satellites include two telemetry formats:
- Slow Speed, also called Data Under Voice (DUV) is 200 bps FSK data sent at the same time as the transponder audio. Whenever the transmitter is on, data is being sent. This happens during beacons and during live QSOs.
- High Speed is 9600 bps FSK sent instead of the transponder. This is used for data intensive experiments such as the Virginia Tech Camera and the University of Iowa HERCI experiment. This is only active when commanded from the ground. You can recognize High Speed because it sounds like an old school computer modem.
- FoxTelem will receive and store both formats assuming you can feed it audio that does not have the frequencies below 200 Hz filtered. For High Speed, the audio must also extend to include the full 9600bps bandwidth of the FM signal. For both modes this is best achieved from a Software Defined Radio or from the 9600 bps packet port of some radios. See the user guide for more details.
Downloading the Program
You can download FoxTelem from the following locations:
- User Guide only (for all versions) 1MB PDF file
FoxTelem is written in Java, so you need to have Java installed. Is is available from www.java.com
Installation Instructions
Run Mac Os On Windows
FoxTelem is supplied as an archive file (.zip on windows or Mac, and .gzip on Linux). You can unzip the contents and put it in the directory of your choice. Right on the desktop works well, as does somewhere in your home directory or documents directory. If you install it into the Mac Applications folder or into the Windows Program Files folder (or any other folder that is not writable by the application), then you will need to choose a different directory to write the decoded data into. You can do this the first time you run the program.
Running FoxTelem
Run FoxTelem by double clicking FoxTelem.exe on Windows or the Application file on MacOs. On Linux, you should be able to double click FoxTelem.jar. If you can’t, then right click, Properties, and change the Open With to be the Java runtime environment.
When FoxTelem starts then you should have the Welcome screen shown below. The Simple install will use the installation directory to store the decoded data. This keeps everything in one place, but mixes the program with its data. If you want to write the data to another directory, choose Custom, click Continue and specify the directory on the next screen.
Further instructions are available in the manual, which is in the installation directory and accessible from the Help menu.
If FoxTelem does not start
FoxTelem will not start if you do not have java installed, or have a version before Java 6. You will get a message from the launcher telling you to download and install the latest version from www.java.com.
If you get an error message from Windows Smartscreen like the below, then click “More Info” and then “Run Anyway”. Windows gives this message for new or little know applications that have not established a reputation.
MacOS has similar security precautions and will give you a message like the below:
FoxTelem is not really damaged and it can in fact be opened. You can hold the “Command” key while you double click the application and it will run. After that it will run without the Command key. This message is displayed because your “Security and Privacy” settings do not allow applications that are not installed from the Mac App Store.
If you are on Windows and the program complains that it is missing MSVCR100.dll or something similar to that, then you need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ redistributable:
If you do not know if you have 32 or 64 bit windows then Open System by clicking the Start button, right-clicking Computer, and then clicking Properties. Under System, you can view the system type.
If you are using MacOS 10.7 or later and you get the message below, then follow the instructions and install Apple’s “legacy” version of Java.
FoxTelem is written and compiled with the latest version of Java (Version 8 in Sept 2015) but it is compliant with Java 6 so that it works on older Mac operating systems. On other platforms you can run FoxTelem with any versions of Java from Java 6, but Apple and Oracle have not made this simple on the Mac.
If FoxTelem still won’t start, then see the troubleshooting section at the end of the manual or ask for help on the amsat-bb mailing list.