This is a little put together from all over the place. Hopefully this is all you need to know about installing Fink and Fink Commander on Mac OS X.
Basically, Fink allows you to use Linux type programs (GUIs and command line) native in OS X. I am not going to dive into all the gory detail of what Fink is and is not, I am just going to get it to work. Fink gives you a command line tool to install these programs (much like apt-get for Ubuntu/Debian). Fink Commander is the GUI for Fink.
From my previous journal entry:
Today I have taken the actions to get my Fink installation going. Here are the steps taken so far:
First I had to do a community update of X11 (for Leopard) to fix some bugs Apple will PROBABLY release an official update soon, but I can’t but I can’t wait that long! I updated X11 to version 2.1.1. Goto this website.
Apparently it is MUCH better to install Fink by source. More information can be found here. You can follow the directions in the web page given. There is a little bit of a problem… you will probably have to add the path /sw/bin to your PATH variable at some point. I am not sure if Fink automatically does this or not. You can do so by adding it to .bashrc or .bash profile… I think. I also ran the selfupdate and the update (but of course there is nothing to update).
One should note that Fink is self-containted in the /sw/ directory. If you ever want to remove it and all the programs that were installed via Fink, just delete that directory!
The only commands you will ever need to know:
- fink list NAMEOFSOFTWARE, scans the available packages and lists those that match your query
- fink install NAMEOFSOFTWARE, installs the package
- fink update-all, updates all binary and source packages. You might run into a problem: see this or this
- fink selfupdate, updates the binary or source version of Fink
If you don’t want to remember these, install Fink Commander. This is the GUI interface and is pretty good. The only thing it wont do is the update-all. So if you have a lot of “outdated” packages run update-all. This will take FOREVER because you will need to build things from source if you installed Fink from source.
Virtual Packages?
From the Fink website: “packages with names like system-perl are placeholder packages. These do not contain actual files, but merely serve as a mechanism for fink to know about programs that have been installed manually outside of fink.
Starting with the 10.3 distribution, most placeholders aren’t even real packages that you can install and remove. Instead, they are “Virtual Packages”, package data structures generated by the fink program itself in response to a pre-configured list of manually installed programs. For each virtual package, fink checks for certain files in certain locations, and if they are found, considers that virtual package “installed”.”
Tags: fink, fink commander
