Chapter 14. DarwinPorts

13.4. Installing Binaries

You can download and install binaries via dselect (shown in Figure 13-3), a console-based frontend to dpkg. To use dselect, you must have superuser (or administrator) privileges, so you'll need to run sudo dselect in the Terminal. Once dselect has started, you can use the following options to maintain, install, and uninstall packages:

[A]ccess

Chooses the access method to use. Configures the network access method to use.

[U]pdate

Downloads the list of available packages from the Fink site. This option is equivalent to running apt-get update. Table 13-2 lists the apt-get and dpkg command-line options.

Figure 13-2. Running the install command in a Terminal window

Figure 13-3. The dselect program's main menu

Table 13-2. Some apt-get and dpkg commands

Command	Description
apt-get update	Updates list of available packages. Do this first.
apt-get install foo	Downloads and installs package foo.
apt-get remove foo	Deletes package foo.
dpkg list	Lists all installed packages.
dpkg listfiles foo	Lists all the files from package foo.
dpkg install foo	Installs package foo.
dpkg remove foo	Deletes package foo. Leaves configuration files.
dpkg purge foo	Deletes foo and configuration files.
dpkg -S /path/to/file	Tells you which package owns a file.

You must run [U]pdate at least once after installing Fink.

Mixing Binary and Source Installations

Using Fink, you can mix binary and source installations. That is, you can install some packages from their precompiled .deb files and install others from source. If you do this, you must first use apt-get to update the available binaries and then use fink selfupdate, followed by fink update-all, to update packages installed from source.

[S]elect

Requests the packages you want on your system. Displays the actual package listing, which is used to select and deselect the packages you want on your system.

[I]nstall

Installs, upgrades, and configures selected packages. Also removes deselected packages.

[C]onfig

Configures any packages that are unconfigured. Not actually needed, since [I]nstall does this after you've installed a package.

[R]emove

Removes unwanted software. Not actually needed, since [I]nstall will do this.

[Q]uit

Quits dselect.