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The GimpBy Francine Schwieder |
[Note--to designate commands you type after the prompt in your terminal I've used "type: bold," so just type, in regular characters, the letters that appear in bold]
I recently discussed how I got the Apple X11 Window Manager installed and working, and also got the UNIX word processor, AbiWord, to run. But my personal holy grail has always been to successfully run The GIMP on my Mac. GIMP (short for Gnu Image Manipulation Program) is free, has tons of features, and runs in various flavors of UNIX. I finally did it, but it wasn't exactly easy. It took several days of web searches, surfing hither and yon, reading message boards and documents, hours of trying things that didn't work, and a lot of perseverence. I'm going to save you all of that effort by explaining just how I finally succeeded.
First you need to install several things from Apple. You'll need to run the Developer's Tools Install CD that came with your full OS X Install. Next you need to install BOTH the Apple X11 program, AND the X11 for Mac OS X Public Beta SDK. This last is not easy to find unless you are on the correct page, and it is easy to overlook (which I did, initially). It is shown down in the lower right corner of the download page, and is referred to as "optional software." If you want to do anything interesting with X11 it isn't optional--it is absolutely necessary.
Once you've done all that the fun really begins. Apparently Apple used some non-standard naming conventions so that the Fink installer stuff wouldn't work. I found and ran a script by Ben Hines called install_name_fix.pl (you can find it at the Fink web site). It is now time to download and install Fink. There are two little "gotchas" in doing this. First you'll have to use either the xterm window that appears when you launch X11, or the regular Terminal program to create a new invisible file in your home directory, and second, you must NOT have installed the Virex 7.2 program updater. Fink creates a folder at the root level of your startup drive called "sw" and so does Virex (why Virex does that I'm sure I don't know). The folks at Fink have informed the folks at Virex of this gaffe so it may get fixed. Be sure to check on this issue. If you're not using Virex 7.2 you can now go ahead and install Fink.
Back to that invisible file. The Fink Download page tells you to create the necessary invisible file using the pico editor in the terminal window. You also could use vi or emacs. Personally I loathe all the command line editors and decided to do something else. It turns out that Apple's own TextEdit program will edit and save in UNIX plain text. What it won't do is an initial save of a file that begins with a period. However, you can open such files, edit them, and then save your changes. You do this by going to "File -->Open..." and in the open dialog box type in the path to the file you want in the "Go to:" space. But the invisible file has to exist first. You will need to use the Terminal. After you have either the Terminal or the X11 xterm running you can type this at the prompt: touch /Users/yourhome/.cshrc thus creating an empty version of the needed file. Now go to TextEdit and in "Go to:" type /Users/yourhome/.cshrc to open the blank file you just created. In that file type, as the only line: source /sw/bin/init.csh and then save.
I never, ever run as root, so the next presupposes that you won't either. Launch X11 and in the xterm window type: sudo fink and then enter your password. Next type: fink selfupdate and hit enter. I was getting lots of error messages when I initially did this because I had not installed that sneaky little SDK package and the name fix. After I did that I thought it might be necessary to fix the seeming source of the problem, so I went back to Fink and in xterm typed: sudo fink gave my password and typed: sudo apt-get install system-xfree86 and hit return. Whether this is necessary if you did everything right to start with I really don't know. Fink has an X11 program that runs from xterm, which they tell you to use to select and install packages, but I couldn't figure out how to use it--it is another of those command line thingies where you navigate and issue commands with the keyboard, and for some reason I'm not very good with that. So I decided to just use the apt-get command.
First I wanted to see what sort of interesting things were available, and try something simple, so in the xterm window I typed: fink list and a whole lot of stuff whizzed by. If you want a copy of this that you can save and then open in TextEdit and study at your leisure (not to mention changing the text to a typeface and size that is more legible), type: fink list | less > /Documents/finklist (the character between "list" and "/Documents" is called a "pipe" and is produced by the key above the return character on your keyboard when you hold down the shift key). A text file named "finklist" will appear in your root level Documents folder. I thought "xtraceroute" sounded interesting, so in the terminal I typed: sudo apt-get install xtraceroute and hit enter, gave my password, and in a brief time it finished doing what it was doing. I discovered that in order to actually use the program I had to launch a new xterm window, then just typed: xtraceroute and the program ran. Thus encouraged I typed: sudo apt-get install gimp and hit return. When the command prompt reappeared I opened a new xterm window and typed: gimp and hit enter. I got a configuration setup window for the program, accepted all the defaults and the GIMP launched. Complete success. Vast satisfaction.
