I haven't been able to find much documentation on building the Darwin operating system from scratch, although it's relatively easy to find guides on compiling Darwin's kernel.

Being familiar with Unix would definitely help, and you'll definitely need Unix (either an existing OS X/Darwin system, or some other *nix) in order to compile your base system. Do lots of research beforehand; something like Linux From Scratch will definitely aid your understanding of how Unix systems are built.

Finally, Apple does offer a ready-made build of Darwin 8.0 (sadly, they only provide source code for the later versions), so if you just want to experience using Darwin without the hassle of compiling it, then try downloading Apple's build first.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply........

Both the guides need..........err........Apple XCode and I think that Apple XCode can only be installed on Apple Mac OSX right!

I don't have an Apple Mac OSX.......

Thanks for the reply again.......waiting for a reply soon!

Bye

Probably I would like to compile it on a Linux machine........Ubuntu or OpenSuSE or Mandriva or Unix System (like PC BSD, Open BSD etc.) maybe.........I wanna know that if it is possible!

Bye again!

>Both the guides need..........err........Apple XCode
Both guides say you should install Xcode (Apple Developer Tools) because it includes the Unix development tools (gcc, etc.).

You should be able to cross-compile the kernel and the base system from Linux using normal development tools, although it'd probably be easier to accomplish this from an existing Darwin system.

Thanks for the quick reply,
Please tell me how to do so...........I couldn't understand............
Thanks again!

Follow the guides for compiling Xnu that I linked to previously. Where the twist comes in is the fact that you'll be needing to cross-compile everything (at least, until you get to the point where you have a bootable system). If you're not familiar with this, or you'd like to take an easier route, I'd highly recommend downloading and installing the pre-compiled Darwin 8.0 from Apple's site, then compile a new version of Darwin from that system.

The darwin compiling guide has moved to http://cs.nyu.edu/~gazzillo/xeniac/c...arwin_x86.html