GIMP, Fink, Free86 and OroborOSX

[Jacques]

Hello!

I have very little knowledge of Xwindows. I would love to have GIMP (among other Xwindow programs) running on my Mac as I have no access to programs such as PhotoShop / Painter, etc.

I've heard that Fink is some kind of install / package manager. I know that Free86 is the Xwindows system. I read nothing but good things about OroborOSX.

For someone like me, who doesn't know all that much about UNIX - what is the safest and easiest route to take, to install GIMP?

So far from what I gather, it would be to install FINK then FREE86 then OROBOR then GIMP - is this the correct order of things?

Thanks for any tips,
Jacques

[mervTormel]

yep. you've got it. search the forums and you'll find plenty of threads on the topics. prepare to do quite a bit of reading. you're going to need to arm yourself for the experience.

to save some time, investigate fink's dselect/apt-get commands so you can download the pre-made binaries rather than run the hours of compiles that come with the other fink install facilities.

[sao]

Jacques,

Like MervTormel said, that's the way to do it.

You can download fink from here:

http://fink.sourceforge.net/download/index.php

After the fink installation, you can install in this order, the xfree86-base and the xfree86-rootless packages by running:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xfree86-base
sudo apt-get install xfree86-rootless

I will recommend you read carefully the info in the following pages:

The Fink FAQ's web page
http://fink.sourceforge.net/faq/index.php

and the Fink Usage web page
http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/bundled/usage.php

Then you can go on to install 'The Gimp' and OroborOSX if you want.

If you have problems, let us know.

Cheers...

[Kris]

I have only had bad experiences with fink, so I chose to installed MacGimp without it.
It's really easy: Just download the MacGimp file, which shall include the XFree86, and click on the install. It's possible that the MacGimp file doesn't include the newest versionof XFree, and if it doesn't you must download the newest version from SourceForge. I do believe it's also possible to do it the other way around. Just note that if you install MacGimp and XFree you can't install fink afterwards (at least it says so in the readme file of fink).
Good luck.


Kris

[sao]

Kris,

Yes, this is typical of macosx.com members, most of them can't handle fink.

When you want I can help you to do a succesfull installation. Let me know.


Jacques, don't feel discouraged.

Thanks to fink I have installed more than 350 packages and growing.

It's a wonderful tool and it's free and easy to use (if you do your homework).

The installation of 'THE GIMP' is quite straightforward.

Most of the people who had some problems with it, was because they didn't do their homework before installing (read the FAQ and usage before using fink) and they didn't want to learn something new, they just wanted the fast lane.

Please give it a try, and let us know if you need any help.


Cheers...

[Kris]

Quote: Originally posted by sao Kris, Yes, this is typical of macosx.com members, most of them can't handle fink.

I doubt my membership at macosx.com had anything to do with the failure of the installation..
I'll let you know when I will try to install it again. Oh, btw, what is the real advantages of using fink?


Kris

[Craig R. Arko]

On the one hand: Sao, don't insult the guys, they've been through a trauma recently.

On the other hand: Kris: how can fink get screwed up? It seemed about as simple as pie to setup and use.

Third hand: the reasons one uses a package manager are:

A) one knows where things are going (at least with fink)
B) one gets configuration (version control) management
C) uninstalling things is easy and fun if needs be (follows from A & B)
D) Nice people write GUI's for them, like Fink Commander.

[sao]

Craig and Kris,

It was not my intention to insult anybody. If my statement was misunderstood, then I want to apologize. I know they have been going through a lot lately.

I just spoke of my own experiences about judgements of fink I read many times in the macosx.com forums, which are generally negative without demonstrating any clear reasons. And I'm talking about statements coming from people who are supposed to help others with their problems, and their negative impression of fink seems to permeate the forums.

If they will show me a fact that fink is really bad, I will probably be the first to stop using it.

That Kris chose to install MacGimp is perfectly okay.

What is not helpful, is to talk about a bad experience with fink without presenting the evidence of what went wrong and presenting the proof of why fink didn't work, in order that we could all learn something from it.

BTW Kris, If you don't understand the advantages of using fink, how can you speak about having had bad experiences?

Why discourage others if you don't understand the subject?

I will advise you to learn more about it before trying to help.


Cheers...


PS: If you are really interested to know what are the advantages of using fink (in addition to what Craig shared), I might be able to help you. Let me know.

[Jacques]

I gather from this conversation that Fink is the way to go, thanks for reference to Fink Commander as well - I enjoy GUIs even though I started out with CLI (may my Amiga rust in peace!)

Once I gather a few moments together, I'm going to try this all out - I look forward to trying out GIMP and other xWindows programs..

I will definately post feedback!

Jacques

[Kris]

Quote: Originally posted by sao If you don't understand the advantages of using fink, how can you speak about having had bad experiences? Why discourage others if you don't understand the subject? I will advise you to learn more about it before trying to help.

I don't believe you are helping someone by only talking about the pros. That is, however, neither the way development happends, nor the way new thoughts come to life.
I do believe you're right about one thing; I should probably have been more specific about my problems with fink, and I'll try to be clearer in the future.
But then again, the question was not about fink, but about the safest and easiest way to instal MacGimp, and I was simply posting a solution to that question...

Jacques: Please keep us updated.

Kris

[nkuvu]

Quote: Originally posted by sao If you don't understand the advantages of using fink, how can you speak about having had bad experiences?

That's easy. If you can't install it for one reason or another, that's a bad experience. It doesn't mean that you have experience with it other than the failed installation. It also doesn't mean that you know exactly what fink does or can do.

[mervTormel]

Quote: Originally posted by nkuvu That's easy. If you can't install it for one reason or another, that's a bad experience. It doesn't mean that you have experience with it other than the failed installation. It also doesn't mean that you know exactly what fink does or can do.

surely, nothing is quite that easy. installation may have failed for numerous reasons, some of them not the fault of you or fink, e.g., full disk (arguably, your own fault), failed download, non-vanilla commands in your path, sun-spots.

your bad experience doesn't translate to the automatic nay-saying of a product to discourage others from attempting it. i'm not saying that you have proclaimed "fink bad" in the past, but that is some of our experience with the fink bashers, and the point sao was trying to make.

sao, don't swing at this pitch in the dirt.

[nkuvu]

I don't consider this a pitch in the dirt at all.

First off, I haven't had any problems with Fink. I don't use it much, but that's not an issue.

Second, Kris originally stated that MacGimp is another way to do things without using Fink because Kris had problems installing Fink.

That's all.

I'm sorry if there are bad feelings towards others who claim Fink is evil. I don't think that my or Kris' posts are anything to do with that, and it seems to me like sao understood that as well.

Oh, and when I said "That's easy", I meant that explaining how you can have a bad experience without being able to install the program is easy. If I spend 14 days installing a new OS because it's so difficult and user-unfriendly (which I am not saying Fink is, this is just a hypothetical example) I'm more likely to say that I've had a bad experience with that OS. No matter what experience I may have with the OS after that. And no matter what the root cause of the OS installation problems may be.

[Craig R. Arko]

We've seen a pile of hypotheticals; anyone care to give a concrete example of a problem with installing fink so we could try to reproduce it and see what happened? Please include pertinent version information.

Thanks!

And best of luck, Jacques!

[Jacques]

Fellow UNIX friends,

Wow. I haven't used CLI much since my old Amiga 1000 (on that machine, I loved tooling around with it - never touched the lousy GUI that Commodore so destroyed), this revisit has been outstanding.

The FINK package installed with no problems, quite simply. I am thoroughly impressed at it's depth and ease of use so far. I still have alot of documentation to go through to get a better understanding of how it works - must I download the GIMP through FINK to install? Which files exactly? I might end up answering my own questions..

I want to stick with installing binaries, sorta edgy about compiling source code for now - must I install the Dev Tools CD? I'd rather avoid it if possible. If I do not and an install requires it, will it break the process or safely inform me that it's needed?

I want to install xWindows now, but I noticed this in the FINK documentation:

Quote: Darwin 1.4.1 is the Darwin version corresponding to Mac OS X 10.1. It should work in general, but this has not been tested as most people just run Mac OS X proper instead. You may run into problems with packages that use features specific to Mac OS X - affected packages include XFree86 and possibly esound.

Does the above mean I should go ahead and install XFree86 without using FINK? I had the impression that FINK would manage it for me.. how did you guys handle it? What windows manager have you folks chosen and why? (BlackBox? Gnome? OroborOSX?) Any of these in particular have advantages over another? Any to absolutely avoid? Is there a clear recommendation?

Thanks so much for all the help, looking forward to hacking away at this again soon!

Jacques

[ateles]

Jacques:

If you already have fink installled, there are two ways to go about installing gimp:

1) Using apt-get. This will download binaries, it is quick and you don't need to compile anything. Make sure you have the most recent version of apt-get by typing

sudo apt-get update

then to install gimp type:

sudo apt-get install gimp

2) Using fink to download sources and compile. This takes longer and you need the developer CD (compilers, etc). if you have those, type:

sudo fink install gimp

Now, once you have the gimp insatlled you want to run it from and X11 windows terminal. If you already have XFree86, go ahead and install OroborOSX (it allows a seamless integration of X windows and Aqua). You can download it from:

http://www.osxgnu.org/software/Xwin/...ers/OroborOSX/

As soon as you have OroborOSX working (it is very easy to install), run it and from a terminal window type:

gimp&

Good luck.

ateles

[ateles]

Jacques:

Actually a couple of rectifications:

1) When you install the gimp (using any of the methods) the dependencies will be taken care of (XFree86 etc...) so don't worry about which you install first. That's the beauty of fink (it takes care of all of that for you).

2) Download OroborOSX from version tracker instead of the link I gave you. This is the latest verison of OroborOSX:

http://www.versiontracker.com/morein...d=12270&db=mac

Good luck.

ateles

[sao]

Jacques,

Great you installed fink. I would also install the December Developer Tools.

Then I would probably do first:

sudo apt-get update

then,

sudo apt-get install xfree86-base (to get Xfree86 4.2.0 installed)

then,

sudo apt-get install xfree86-rootless (to get the XDarwin.app installed)

then,

sudo apt-get install windowmaker (to install a window manager)

Then I would probably start the XDarwin.app and choose full-screen mode to check if the XFree86 installation went allright.

You asked which window manager I use:

The first one I installed was windomaker (is a great workhorse), but I use also enlightenment, icewm, and in rootless mode, I prefer blackbox rather than OroborOSX, but the last one, although a bit buggy works well too.)

then I would finally run:

sudo apt-get install gimp

And then after all this, I would install several window managers and also OroborOSX to ckeck which one I prefer to use.


Cheers...


PS: Anyhow, please understand that the above, is just how I would do it, but is up to you really, to choose the way you like to follow.

I would also suggest you to read the "XFree86 Install guide" (although a little outdated is an excellent reference for beginners) and is made by Rob Griffiths, the creator of this forum and the MacOS X Hints web site. You can download the guide from here:

http://homepage.mac.com/rgriff/xdarwin.html

-

[bassballs]

Hi!

I really recorment this site written by the great est linux man on macīs Jonas Smedegaard in denmark

http://debian.jones.dk/fink

Here you will find a guide that makes it so easy to install fink and all the packages you want. I did it myself and it went perfect the first time. It's so easy. It will be up and running in 20 minutes.

regards from

Anders

[sao]

bassballs,

Sorry, I tried the link you wrote and it doesn't work. Is it the correct address?

Cheers...