Darling shell
We plan to implement a nice and user-friendly GUI for Darling, but for now the primary way to use Darling and interact with it is via the Darling shell.
Basic usage
To get a shell inside the container,
just run darling shell as a regular user. Behind the scenes, this command will
start the container or connect to an already-running one and spawn a shell
inside. It will also automatically load the kernel module and initialize the
prefix contents if needed.
Inside, you'll find an emulated macOS-like environment. macOS is Unix-like, so
most familiar commands will work. For example, it may be interesting to run ls -l /, uname and sw_vers to explore the emulated system. Darling bundles
many of the command-line tools macOS ships — of the same ancient versions. The
shell itself is Bash version 3.2.
The filesystem layout inside the container is similar to that of macOS,
including the top-level /Applications, /Users and /System directories. The
original Linux filesystem is visible as a separate partition that's mounted on
/Volumes/SystemRoot. When running macOS programs under Darling, you'll likely
want them to access files in your home folder; to make this convenient, there's a
LinuxHome symlink in your Darling home folder that points to your Linux home
folder, as seen from inside the container; additionally, standard directories
such as Downloads in your Darling home folder are symlinked to the
corresponding folders in your Linux home folder.
Running Linux Binaries
You can run normal Linux binaries inside the container, too. They won't make use of Darling's libraries and system call emulation and may not see the macOS-like environment:
darling shell
Darling [~]$ uname
Darwin
Darling [~]$ /Volumes/SystemRoot/bin/uname
Linux
Becoming root
Should you encounter an application that bails out because you are not root
(typically because it needs write access outside your home directory), you can
use the fake sudo command. It is fake, because it only makes
getuid()
and
geteuid()
system calls return 0, but grants you no extra privileges.
Examples
darling shell: Opens a Bash prompt.darling shell /usr/local/bin/someapp arg: Execute/usr/local/bin/someappwith an argument. Note that the path is evaluated inside the Darling Prefix. The command is started through the shell (usessh -c).darling ~/.darling/usr/local/bin/someapp arg: Equivalent of the previous example (which doesn't make use of the shell), assuming that the prefix is~/.darling.