Mac drivers
In my previous posts, I have been dwelling much on Microsoft Windows drivers and although I had written something on Linux drivers in a previous article, I have not given Mac drivers much attention. With the recent developments in Macs, I felt it’s important for me to talk a little about Mac drivers if there are any.
Mac OS X ranges of operating systems are based on the Mach kernel platform and include the versions: 10.0 – cheetah, 10.1 – puma, 10.2 – jaguar, 10.3 – panther, 10.4 – tiger and 10.5 – leopard. The latest version is the 10.5 – leopard that was released in October 26, 2007. Mac OS X range of OS’s are generally built to with Macintosh products thus cannot work with processors made by other companies.
Currently after Microsoft Windows operating system, Mac OS X is ranked second in terms of general purpose functionality. Mac OS X range of operating systems’ are not backward compatible and unlike windows are rarely attacked by bugs because the OS’s are frequently updated. To curb the bug - attack problem antivirus programs for Macs are available in the market.
Though it is not an open source operating system like Linux, it has open source components and is the most successful UNIX-like operating system released, reaching a penetration of more than ten times that of Linux.
Since Mac OS X supported only the full line of Macintosh components, other hardware manufacturers did not dwell on making hardware compatible with the Mac OS X thus issues such as device driver problems were scarce. However, third parties have developed tools such as XPostFacto and patches applied to the installation discs that enable newer versions of Mac OS X to be installed on systems not officially supported by Apple. This has caused an increase in the number of device driver problems.
Other tools have also been developed by the company itself such as Boot Camp, which contains Mac-specific Windows drivers, and helps install Windows XP and Windows Vista and also enables dual boot of the operating systems. Boot Camp does not however contain all the necessary drivers required for all the Mac hardware to be compatible with Windows. More of the drivers can be downloaded from the Apple website.
With the talk of a new Mac OS X (10.6 – Snow Leopard) set to hit the market in September 2009 together with the Apple transition from PowerPC to Intel, most of the current PowerPC compatible software are predicted to become obsolete. Apple however, decided to let Rosetta (a layer which enables software compiled for PowerPC) to be installed additionally onto the Snow Leopard so as to allow such software to be compatible.
Given the fact that Apple stated that Mac OS X would not run on Intel-based personal computers aside from its own, a hacked version of the OS compatible with conventional x86 hardware was developed by the OSx86 community. This prompted Apple to announce on June 8 2009, at its Worldwide Developers Conference that Snow Leopard (version 10.6) would drop support for PowerPC processors and be Intel-only. Whether Rosetta is still supported is unclear.
I guess Mac driver issues will become more frequent in the future in line with these recent developments and hence users will need to be more aware of the need to update their drivers frequently.