I mentioned in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard, From a Developer’s Perspective that X11 under Leopard was seriously broken. There’s some new information on how to properly work with ith which helps quite a bit.

The confusion lies in a change in the way that the X server is started. In Tiger, when you wanted to use X11 you’d start the server manually. In Leopard, it’s started automatically via launchd, which controls the DISPLAY variable and detects when something’s trying to talk to the X server and starts it.

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Apple’s eagerly awaited operating system, MacOS X 10.5, also known as “Leopard”, is now in our hands, and there are quite a few features in it that will be interesting to developers. Amazon is still offering Leopard for $20 off list and Leopard Family Pack (5-user license) for $10 off list.

I do limited development on MacOS X. I don’t write Macintosh applications, but I do write web-based applications that I deploy to non-Macintosh servers. The Mac is a great environment for doing this; I get a real UNIX environment under the hood with Apache, MySQL and Perl, and a nice layer of Macintosh over the surface. After years of struggling with Windows and Cygwin, or living with Windows and Linux, it’s been wonderful moving to a single, reasonable environment for working.

Given that, my emphasis on development under Leopard will be on the kinds of tools a web developer might use, rather than XCode, although I’ll touch on XCode at the end.

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Apple has finally announced the release date for their new OS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. You can pre-order Leopard at the Apple Store with free shipping and they promise it will arrive on Friday October 26th. You can also pre-order it at Amazon. Amazon is offering a $20 rebate when you order Leopard and Parallels at the same time, and is also currently charging $20 less for Leopard than Apple is. Amazon says they’ll ship Leopard on Friday October 26th.

Check it out at the Apple Store (click here) or at Amazon (click here).
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