Installing Fink on OS X
Every flavor of *nix has some form of package management system. Gentoo has portage, Debian has the apt toolset which is also borrowed by Ubuntu, Red Hat, and now Suse, have RPM. Mac OS X, having *nix at its core, is no different.
Enter Fink. Fink is a powerful source-based package management system for OS X written in Perl and maintained by the Fink Project. While there are a number of binary packages available through the project, the available packages are primarily distributed as source and usually require the standard GNU dev toolchain to compile (gcc, make, etc). Either way, it’s easy to use, makes everything you’ll probably ever need to develop software in an OS X dev environment immediately available, and is terminal-based in the good-old unix tradition. There is a GUI that offers basic package management capabilities, but who cares– in my experience I spend so much time at a shell that switching back to the gui costs more time than it saves.
Here’s what you’ll need to install Fink:
- Mac OS X Developer Tools (XCode 2.4 with gcc 4.0, X11)
- The Fink installable binary
Prerequisite: Installing OS X XCode Developer Tools
You can get these packages off of the OS X installer CD that came with your system. It might be dated, so you’re probably better off getting them directly from Apple via the Apple Developer Connection portal downloads section. This requires a valid ADC account and enough time to download a 900MB installable. Note that X11 is optional since it’s also available through Fink as a source package, but installing the Apple-bundled binary will save you loads of compile time (roughly a working day).
XCode uses the standard OS X package installer, so just click on through and wait until it’s done. By default the WebObjects API and CHUD profiling tools are not installed, so if you want these be sure to use the custom installation method. The installation of actual executables takes about 10 minutes, though the indexing of the documentation bundled with the tools takes anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on your machine. Sit back and relax until all this is done. It took 45 minutes on my 1.33Ghz G4 Powerbook.
Installing Fink
The Fink installable can be found at the Fink Project homepage in the downloads section. There are separate builds for Intel and PPC macs since, so make sure you get the right one.
Click through the standard package installer screens as usual. One of the last steps will set up your path to call the fink installed binaries (you’ll be prompted for the admin password when this happens). This is necessary since all the fink libraries and binaries are compiled into the /sw directory. On my machine Fink auto-configured the path only for X11 xterms, leaving all my Fink goodies unavailable from the standard terminal. If this happens you need to configure the path to use these binaries by manually add ’source /sw/bin/init.sh’ to your ~/.profile file.
That’s it Fink is now installed. All we need to do now is update it and configure its use. Fire up a shell and call…
$ fink selfupdate
to update Fink to the current stable release and update the package cache. You may be asked to set some configuration preferences related to mirrors and logging, but in most cases you can just accept the defaults. Once this is done call…
$ fink update-all
to update all the installed packages on your system using the fresh package list (if any new releases are available).
That’s all there is to installing Fink. Check back later for instructions on how to actually use Fink.
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