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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Fink 0.5.0a Released for Jaguar 65

Posted by pudge from the finkiriffic dept.
benh57 writes "The binary release of Fink for Mac OS X 10.2 has finally been released! This release includes over 700 binary packages for Mac OS X 10.2 as well as over 1800 source packages of all kinds. Fink ports Unix software to Mac OS X and makes it available using debian tools like apt-get, as well as a build from source package manager." I'll be selfupdating tonight ...
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Fink 0.5.0a Released for Jaguar More

Fink 0.5.0a Released for Jaguar

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  • apt-get + OS X!!! Two years ago I couldn't have dreamed it could be this good!!

    Now if only I could use mac apps on a thin-client. Digging through config files leads me to belive that it might be possible.

    • Re:I'm in love. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Now if only I could use mac apps on a thin-client. Digging through config files leads me to belive that it might be possible.

      It depends on just how thin you need your client to be. You could easily netboot a room full of older imacs, without hardrives, from an xserve or two in the closet.

      And, of course, X11 programs are just as X-forward-able when running on darwin/osx as anywhere else (so, yes, you can have a room full of cheapo x86 boxen running the same copy of gimp on a mac in the other room... ssh -X is the quickest way, though you can do it without ssh's encryption and compression, too, if you feel so inclined.) But thats probably not what you meant by mac apps now, is it :)

  • Great software... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) <nowalmart.gmail@com> on Monday December 09, 2002 @05:08PM (#4847394) Homepage Journal
    I bought my G4 in March, and finally installed Fink about a month ago.

    I cannot believe I did not do it sooner. Tools like dselect and apt-get are truly great. I was setting up some local Spam filtering, using Fetchmail, PostFix, Procmail, and Spambouncer. I also installed Pine and Lynx so I could easily SSH into the machine and use it.

    Fink made the process so seamless and easy that I was amazed.

    I had researched installing the different programs by hand, and the instructions for each were several pages long. Fink reduced this down to a handful of terminal commands.

    I went ahead and installed X11 with Sawfish and Gnome. The screenshot [vampy-alumni.org] was simply amazing.

    The fact that Apple's OS, combined with these tools, makes running these applications this easy is simply jaw-breaking.

    The good people behind Fink deserve a large pat on the break, as well as Apple, who made something like this possible in the first place.

    • No thank you! (Score:5, Funny)

      by pschmied ( 5648 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:00PM (#4849996) Homepage
      The fact that Apple's OS, combined with these tools, makes running these applications this easy is simply jaw-breaking.


      Jaw-breaking? I'm glad you posted. I think I'll just back slowly away from my keyboard now.

      -Peter
    • I have been using fink and love it, but I've been wary of installing X11, and most of the packages want it there, even when it is not necessary (e.g. ghostscript-nox). I like aqua and I really don't want to mess with window managers again (it's one thing I don't miss about linux.... choice and flexibility are great in theory but in practice I don't have time or energy to fiddle with textfiles I barely understand just to get my terminals to fit on my screen), so I've just laid off installing it at all. Am I just being silly? Does everyone install it, whether you use it or not?
      • One problem I ran into with X11 with Fink was multiple monitors. I do not think that Gnome and X11 knew what to do with my three monitors. I never really resolved those issues, but by and large everything worked in the end with little to no "tweaking" on my part.

        Sawfish+Gnome also seemed to suck a lot of processes, even when running in the background.

        Other than that, though, it ran fairly well.
    • I installed fink a while back. I love it. It basically allows users to install/keep uptodate opensourece software.

      The install was a little confusing but well worth it. It really shows off the power of unix and Free software. I love having all the tools I use at work at home.

      Prior to fink I updated my perl install by hand. With fink one app-get command and its there.

      I also installed X too (for xemacs). The X is cludgy, but works well enough.

      It makes the mac so much more powerful..
    • Yes but HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET IT TO WORK??? I have been spending the past week download and compiling just about everything that was available but nothing works. Using XDarwin I get some error about 0 server. Using terminal it gives me an error on a file that apparently doesn't exist. Can somebody please help me??!!!

  • Great project (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ernst_mulder ( 166761 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @05:22PM (#4847595) Homepage
    Fink really is something great, it's a huge effort and almost all installed packages are patched by Fink in order to compile. Installing a package using Fink does take a while, but the simple fact that it works is already simply amazing. It's great to be able to compare GIMP to Photoshop for instance, or to play with various other X11 or unix tools. Another great thing is that when you're done playing a simple "rm -rf /sw" will get rid of Fink completely (and a minor edit to your .rc). But it's staying on my Mac. Another great thing is that when you find an error in a package, and report it, the patch is quite often there the next day. Combine this with OroborOSX, XonX and FinkCommander and you'll have a dream machine.
  • Why is it that Apple didn't include their own version of these tools? It's a shame that we have to go somewhere else to get what we really want.

    That being said fink is great.

    • They actually do. Hubbard and Fuller from Apple Computer are part of the Darwin Ports project [opendarwin.org]. I'm not sure what Apple's issue with Fink is in principle (I can think of things that could be improved if they had more resources); as it seems to me to be just about perfect for installation of Unix/X11 apps.

      I'd might guess that they want to sink up fully to the FreeBSD ports collection, but that would be a guess. So yes Apple does have an official project and for some reason they went this direction rather than supporting / improving / changing fink to fit their needs.

    • Re:Question (Score:3, Informative)

      by Wesley Felter ( 138342 )
      Because it's a lot of work for apps that most Mac users don't want.
    • Why is it that Apple didn't include their own version of these tools?
      you couldn't expect them to add gtetrinet to their os anyway :)
    • Well I'm guessing that as with a lot of OS X Open Source projects (e.g. Chimera) it will become harder to tell where "Apple Official Software" and "Open Source" begin and end as the software gets more mature.

      Apple isn't going to put its imprimata on software that doesn't, for example, have a fairly simple and foolproof install process.

      I'm guessing Apple value-added versions of Fink and Chimera will appear as "part of the OS" at some future date.

  • Gui for this (Score:5, Informative)

    by 1155 ( 538047 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @05:46PM (#4847959) Homepage
    Well, two things

    First off, they finished this yesterday, actually got it yesterday in the irc chan on irc://irc.openprojects.net in #fink. It's really a cool installer, even detects if you have an old install and what not.

    Second, there is a gui for this, http://finkcommander.sourceforge.net/

    It has buttons to e-mail a developer if a package is working for you, and also shows columns for if this package is out of date, or up to date, etc. It's searchable, and really cool. It doesn't require X11, it's a native apple app!

    Other than that, I would like to congratulate all the people involved, for the hard work they have put into this. It's a very awesome thing.
    • Thanks for the Fink Commander link; I found Fink's own installer utility to be rather user-unfriendly. At least with the former, when I said I wanted Gimp, it knew what other libraries were needed and where there was more than one to choose from, it gave me the choice. On the other hand, after a lot of downloading, I got a "C compiler cannot create executables" error message; what kind of compiler can't do that? "Failed: compiling audiofile-0.2.3-4 failed" Well, I guess I'll figure it out eventually...

      • do you have the developer tools installed?
        • Yes, but not the versions that come with Jaguar. I have the March 2001 tools, rather than the July 2002 ones. I'll install them later to see if it helps.

          Of course, the reason I didn't update them is that I'd never really used them, until now.

          • That would definitely be a problem, the 10.1 dev tools are not compatible with Jaguar at all. Install the July tools, and then the subsequent patches, and you should be fine.
            • Yes, they're compiling now. Not that I know how to use most of these programs; the only one I've tried that runs when I tell it to is cmatrix, a little program that makes random letters descend from the top of the terminal window. It would look better in green & black than black & white, of course. I installed 'X-Windows with GNOME support', but I guess I can't run it by itself.

  • Paths? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @06:30PM (#4848544)
    Dumb question, but for those programs that need configuration files and environment variables updated, does the binary version do this properly? Just curious. I'd assume yes but was curious of how they do this if they don't run the installer.

    i.e. "make" to compile, "make install" to install. Or did I just answer my own question?

    • Re:Paths? (Score:4, Informative)

      by benh57 ( 525452 ) <bhines.alumni@ucsd@edu> on Monday December 09, 2002 @06:33PM (#4848576) Homepage
      Yes, even with the binary installer one of the install steps is to add "source /sw/bin/init.csh" to your .cshrc (or .tcshrc, etc). That script adds any env vars that packages set as well as the fink paths to your path.
      • Hmm.. this could be changed up though, think about it for a second.. sed and awk are on macs by default right? and if not, it could be included in the packager (ok, so I am reinstalling OSX on my iBook as we speak, I was.. disatisfied with how I partitioned everything)

        You could ls -al the passwd file, and see what the current users shell is, and say it's bash, grep for the config files, if they are present, then add the line to it, and export the file. Wouldn't be all that (yeah, like I could do this, yeesh! but I know some people could do it..)

        You could specify if you want the current user, a user with administrative rights, or the root user to do this. After that, you're pretty much done, it changes those files, then updates itself if you say yes, go ahead and check for updates. Then it asks if you would like a gui for this, and gives you a link to finkcommander.sourceforge.net if you do.

        Might be worth something.

  • TeX (Score:3, Interesting)

    by addaon ( 41825 ) <addaon+slashdot@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Monday December 09, 2002 @07:48PM (#4849375)
    Before I go through a full install, can anyone confirm if TeX works?

    --

  • selfupdating? (Score:5, Funny)

    by yack0 ( 2832 ) <keimel@nospam.gmail.com> on Monday December 09, 2002 @08:00PM (#4849478) Homepage
    > I'll be selfupdating tonight ...

    If you do that too much you'll go blind ya know.

  • I am so happy! I'm doin' the Snoopy dance!

    Regards,

    John, doin' the Snoopy dance

    Falling You [mp3.com] -- exploring the beauty of voice and sound

  • It's giving me a no mountable disks error.... although I can mount other disk images just fine.
  • Any way to convince fink that I have mysql installed already? I install mysql as a seperate package outside of fink.
    • you have to somehow set its hold flag. from the dpkg manpage:
      hold A package marked to be on hold is not handled by dpkg, unless forced to do that with option --force-hold.
      I remember it having something to do with an option to apt-get called insert or something but I can't seem to find it again...

  • Immersing traditional Mac users in OSS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @04:05AM (#4852561)
    I am your stereotypical Mac user who could still negotiate System 6 with his eyes closed yet before OS X knew little to nothing about *nix. Aside from my computer bible (Mac OS X: Unleashed), Fink has been the single most valuable tool for introducing me to the open source community. I tried compiling a few programs by myself before I used Fink, and I must say that it was a daunting task. However, with Fink I have been exposed to a ton of OSS that I never would have tried in the first place because it wouldn't be worth going through the pain of installing something I just wanted to check out.

    As great as the software is, I am equally impressed by the community of fink users. I installed Linux on my TiBook just to check it out, yet when I went on IRC for help I was ignored at best and treated with hostility at worst. I went into #fink today asking some questions which I realized were rather newbish later, yet I was still treated kindly and my questions were answered to my full satisfaction and then some.

    Congratulations on a job well done to everyone who has helped with Fink. Keep up the good work!
  • I just typed 'sudo fink update' in a (Fink-installed) xterm. What do I do when it reinstalls Xfree86 and kills that ttyp process?
  • In the cruelest irony, Fink, my E-Z package updater, is proving itself a real pain to update.

    Here's the deal. I recently upgraded OS X 10.1 to 10.2. I have done all the Developer tool and XDarwin updates without incident. I have an old fink binary distribution (0.3.2a). All I want to do is update to 0.5.0a. How??

    The website has a link to its "Upgrade Matrix" [sourceforge.net]. It says to run sudo apt-get update.
    This fails at various points with FATAL -> Could not set non-block flag Operation not supported by device. Yes, very helpful, thanks. Maybe sourceforge's servers are slashdotted?? I ran this multiple times. Fails at different points with the same error...one time it ran through with no errors. Ran fink --version. Still 0.3.2a.

    But I don't know if I even trust the Upgrade Matrix as it hasn't been--er--upgraded for a LONG time. It makes no reference to 10.2 or Fink 0.5.0a. On the other hand, the Fink site at one point had this [sourceforge.net] page describing how to upgrade to the beta 10.2-compatible version of Fink. It basically looks like involved downloading the Fink software archive and recompliling it. I think. Do I still have to do it this way?

    And of course the simplest option--that is, downloading the official Fink 0.5.0a binary installer--comes with a stern warning about NOT upgrading with the installer! "Please see the Upgrade Matrix" (?!).

    And what's with all the version numbers? The latest Fink binary is 0.5.0a. But the package installer is like 0.9.12 or so. And the software archive is like 0.11.1. What gives? Is this common in the Linux/Debian world?

    Argh. Any insight would be appreciated.
    • I would recommend doing what I did with my old (pre 0.5.0a) Fink stuff: rm -rf /sw Now you have a clean slate and you can proceed to install the binary installer, then get all the packages you want. Ok, it's a re-install, not an upgrade. But this way it is guaranteed to work.

    • Re:Fink Updating Woes (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ranger Rick ( 197 )
      Try a 'fink selfupdate-cvs' to get your base fink packages up to the latest. The likely problem is that your apt sources.list is pointing at the wrong place (we had to move the binary URL so it could coexist with 10.1 binaries on the apt repository).

      A selfupdate-cvs should upgrade your apt and set up the proper locations, and from there you can do an "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" to get your installation updated.

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