Installing Additional Software


Apple has included a good selection of software with Mac OS X, however sooner or later you’ll find yourself wanting to do more with your computer than work with the included applications. You may also wish to avail yourself of the wealth of software available for Unix. In order to install traditional Unix software on your Macintosh you’ll first need to ensure that you’ve got the right tools.

Install Apple Software for Unix

Apple provides several software tools that allow further access to the Unix system than do the applications that come shrink-wrapped with Mac OS X. In order to install additional Unix software, Apple Developer Tools must be installed. Read on for an explanation of the developer tools and why you’ll need to have them installed.

When software developers write software, they write it using a computer language. For the Macintosh, traditionally this was Pascal. On Mac OS X, however, there are many more choices for the developer. Popular choices are C, C++, Objective-C (developed by NeXT Computer, and now called Cocoa by Apple), Java, and many others. After code is written, it is run through a piece of software called a compiler. The compiler takes the human-readable code that the programmer or programming team wrote, and transforms it to machine-readable code that the computer takes and executes. When the code has been compiled, the result is a binary file, which is no longer human readable. If programmers want to make a change to the program, they would need to make changes to their source code and then recompile the code, producing a new binary program. Generally, when you purchase software for your computer, you are given only the binary application, not the source code. In other words, when you purchase software for your computer, no assembly is generally required.

Working with Unix software is an entirely different experience. Unix has its roots in academic research and its initial user base was mostly programmers. The operating system was designed by programmers and for programmers. The standard way of distributing software for Unix is by distributing the source code. This is considered useful, because the user is now empowered. Don’t like the way something works? Change it yourself. Find a bug, fix it, and email the developer with what you did. This active participation means that the user never has to wait for a vendor fix. Of course, most users are busy doing other tasks and don’t generally feel compelled to fix bugs in their software. However, knowing that you can fix a bug is a comfort. A user is expected to have the tools installed on their own system to compile or build the software locally, after making changes to the source code. The advantage to this is that the software can be written in one place but can run on a variety of systems. This is immediately visible when you consider that much software has been written to run on Linux, but it can be compiled on a Mac OS X system and run as if it was designed for a Mac. We will cover installing some popular free software utilities later in this Chapter. For now we will have to install some tools that will allow us to install software later.

If you have not already done so, you’ll have to install the Apple Developer Tools software. The Developer Tools software is part of the new Xcode software for software developers.

In order to install Developer Tools, you need to insert the Xcode Tools CD into your computer. Launch the Install Xcode Tools package and click through the first few screens. When you get to the installation type, choose Custom. Then select at least Developer Tools Software and the BSD SDK as shown in Figure 25-1. Other packages are optional.

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Figure 25-1: Using the Install Xcode Tools package to install Developer Tools Software.

Installing X11 for Mac OS X

Now that you’ve installed Apple Developer Tools, you can build software for your Mac OS X system. However, you’ll be limited to software that displays in text-only mode and is usable only from within the Terminal application. Install X11 in order to run your Unix programs in full-screen mode. Apple has provided a full-featured X-Windows implementation in X11. X11 encompasses an entire graphic environment for a computer. Everything that Aqua does for Mac OS X, X-Windows does for a Unix system. Apple has done a great job of hiding this complexity. X-Windows systems provide what is called a window manager. The window manger does exactly what it sounds like it does: it manages windows, including where windows are located on screen, if windows are minimized, window dimensions, and so on. In short, all the things that you see on screen are, in fact, managed.

X11 for Mac OS X also contains a window manager. This one is different than what you would see on a traditional Unix or Linux system. The one that Apple provides is invisible. The elements that it draws are functionally and visually equivalent to their Aqua counterparts. Hence, a window’s title bar looks the same whether it is being presented by Aqua or X11. This is a significant achievement, although it looks like nothing. This allows you to seamlessly switch between applications, regardless of which system they were originally designed for. As discussed in Chapter 17, when using Classic, application title bars and menus appear different than they do in Mac OS X–native applications.

If X11 was installed on your computer when you installed or upgraded to Panther, or at the factory, then it will be available in your Applications folder. If X11 has not been installed, then you will need to use the Panther installation disks, and do a customized upgrade. Choose X11 from the list of software and let the installer complete its task.

Third-party installation tools

Now you have ensured that both Apple Developer Tools and X11 are installed, and you’re ready to leap into the deep end of software installation. There are two ways to go about installing software on your system. The sure-fire, longer way; and the very easy way, which may sometimes not work quite the way you would like, requiring you to go back to the long way. In this section, you’ll set up the system to run third-party software that is designed to aid you in the task of installing additional software. The little bit of effort in installing this software will more than pay off in ease of use for installing software in the future. And, it will keep your installed software up to date. This is an important benefit because most open source software projects are constantly improving; the only way to benefit from these software improvements and security updates is to be running the latest versions.

The day the first Mac OS X system came out of the box, there were thousands of software programs available in the form of source code downloads. Early adapters rushed to build software on Mac OS X, and found that with simple tweaks to the makefiles and other install files, both of which are mostly of use to programmers and compilers only, the software would build and run. Over time, many developers integrated these changes that were made by individual users into their own software distributions, making many programs easier to install on the Mac now. However, each individual program has to be dealt with individually, some have been adapted for Mac OS X, others have not Tracking which software builds out of the box, and which requires little tweaks can be a real chore. And if you are simply looking to use a program that may be useful to you, you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to get it to work on your computer. This is where Fink comes in. The developers of Fink have tracked hundreds of software packages and integrated the changes that let this software build on Mac OS X, patching the source code where necessary and doing other busy work so that you don’t have to.

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The Fink Project

Fink is a project that grew out of the excitement of Mac OS X being based on Unix. Early adapters to Mac OS X realized the power of the new operating system and were eager to mine the wealth of free Unix software available at sites like http://freshmeat.net/, http://sourceforge.net/ and other such repositories. Although building each individual software package was not entirely difficult, each package offered its own unique challenges. The Fink developers, initially Christoph Pfisterer and others started to make notes of what had to be done to each package, and then developed a tool to automate making these changes. Also, most Linux systems have software that automates not only the installation process, but also the upgrade process. After a piece of software is installed on your system, you should be able to upgrade it simply. Often upgrading Unix software can be a chore, the goal was to ease this operation, and make the entire procedure more Mac like in the process. To learn more about Fink and their project goals, please visit their Web site at http://fink.sourceforge.net.

From Fink — FAQ — General: http://fink.sourceforge.net/faq/

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Over time, the Fink project has collected many Unix applications, and has made installing these applications on your Macintosh extremely simple. There are several ways to use Fink, most from the command line. However, you can also use Fink in conjunction with another piece of software called Fink Commander. Fink Commander provides a graphical user interface to the Fink software. This provides all the utility of the command line program with the familiar ease of use of a Macintosh application. First, you install Fink, and then you install Fink Commander.

Installing Fink

Fink can be downloaded from the project homepage at fink.sourceforge.net. Follow the download link and click to download the binary installer. The current version is 0.5.3; however, the software is continually updated, so make sure to get the latest version. The binary installer is available as a disk image (.dmg) file. After downloading and expanding the disk image file, you’ll have a disk image with several items. The main feature is the Fink Installer.pkg file. Double-click the package file to launch the Fink installer to install Fink on your system, as shown in Figure 25-2.

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Figure 25-2: Run the Fink installer from the binary installer disk image.

After the installation is complete, a shell script opens in a new Terminal window. The script asks for permission, before changing your shell configuration files to execute the script /sw/bin/init.sh at login. Fink creates a directory at the root of your hard drive called sw. The script /sw/bin/init.sh adds sw to your search path as well as enabling any HTTP or FTP proxies that may be set in the Fink configuration file. Figure 25-3 shows the pathsetup.command script launched in a Terminal window.

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Figure 25-3: When the Fink install is completed the pathsetup.command script is launched in a Terminal window. Enter Y to continue.

You can use Fink in several different ways to browse through available software and install and upgrade software packages on your Mac OS X system. For complete information and instructions, please refer to the Fink documentation provided at the project’s home page, http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/users-guide/ or follow the links in the included Documentation.html file in the Fink Installer Disk. A brief listing of the available ways to use Fink follows:

  • Fink: This is the catch-all command. It works to download and compile source code on your computer. This no-frills command will generally work when other invocations pose problems. You use the fink command to install software in the following section. In order to use the fink command you’ll need to have the developer tools installed. To use the fink command, simply type fink in a terminal window.

  • dselect: Dselect is a curses-based text application that runs in Terminal. Curses is a Unix library which controls screen display in a terminal window, providing menus, inverse video, and allow a program to run in full-screen mode (full terminal window mode that is), rather than line-based output. Like other curses-based applications, dselect takes over the entire Terminal window, allows you to use the arrow keys for navigation, and is very friendly to use, as far as command-line-based software goes. Dselect has extensive built-in help pages, and is very simple. You can use dselect to browse the Fink software collection. A useful feature of dselect is that it will show you the version of the software that you have installed, and will show you the latest version available from Fink. This is helpful in order to ensure that the software you are running is the most up to date. If there is a newer version available, upgrading is as simple as selecting the package for installation. Figure 25-4 shows the dselect program running in a Terminal window.

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    Figure 25-4: Browsing available packages with dselect.

  • Apt-get: Apt-get is the engine that does the heavy lifting for dselect. Apt-get is invoked at the terminal, as are the other utilities. We will not be discussing the use of apt-get. If you are curious however, typing apt-get -h in a Terminal window will get you started.

  • FinkCommander: FinkCommander is a GUI for Fink. Its functionality is identical to dselect, except it runs as a full-screen application. FinkCommander is included in the Fink installer disk. Simply drag the application folder from the mounted installer disk to your hard drive, preferably in your Applications folder. To launch the software, double-click the icon in your applications folder. Using FinkCommander to browse available software is shown in Figure 25-5.

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    Figure 25-5: Browsing available packages with FinkCommander.

Now that Fink is installed on your system and you are comfortable using it to locate, install, and update software, you need to explore this treasure trove of software.

Useful software

In this section, we give a brief overview of useful software that can be installed on your Mac OS X system, to make your computer a bit more usable, flexible, and fun. All of the software being discussed in this section can be installed in several ways. As the software mentioned is all open source, full source code can be downloaded from the respective project’s home pages. For brevity’s sake, we used the easiest way to install the following packages, with Fink from the command line. FinkCommander can also be used to install the software if desired.

Lynx

Lynx is a text-mode Web browser, meaning that it runs in a Terminal window. Lynx has no GUI. It doesn’t display graphic images as pictures, rather it displays their addresses. This sounds useless but can prove indispensable in troubleshooting Web pages. It’s great to see what’s going on with a remote site that is proving slow to load. Also, it can be invaluable in tracking down Web bugs either in Web pages or email. Web bugs are generally invisible and cannot be viewed with a traditional Web browser. Figure 25-6 shows the Lynx browser in action.

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Figure 25-6: Text-based Web browsing with Lynx.

To install Lynx using Fink, simply type fink install lynx, as shown in Figure 25-7. For more information on Lynx, visit the project home page at http://lynx.isc.org/

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Figure 25-7: Installing Lynx with Fink.

NcFTP

Ncftp is a command line FTP client. It’s a full-featured FTP client, with many modern features, and is far easier to use than standard FTP. It’s got a wealth of features that make using FTP from the command a pleasure. Some of the improvements to the standard FTP client are progress meters, command-line editing, file name completion, auto-resume downloads, bookmarks, host redialing, downloading of whole directories, and more. NcFTP is very much like a Web browser for FTP servers. Figure 25-8 shows the NcFTP help text.

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Figure 25-8: NcFTP — the better FTP client.

NcFTP also comes with the utility programs, ncftpget and ncftpput. These programs are provided as conveniences for shell scripting. These programs can be used in shell scripts to automate FTP actions, such as downloading logs from a Web server or uploading data to a server on a nightly basis.

For more information on NcFTP please visit the NcFTP client home page at http://www.ncftpd.com/ncftp/.

To install NcFTP, simply type fink install ncftp, as shown in Figure 25-9.

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Figure 25-9: Installing Ncftp with Fink.

Wget

GNU Wget is designed for downloading Web content from the command line. Where Lynx is a full-featured Web browser, Wget is specifically designed for when you are trying to downloading files from a Web site. Additionally, Wget can download from FTP servers using the FTP protocol. Wget is very useful for when a server is very busy. You can copy the address from your Web browser into your clipboard and let Wget download the file for you.

Wget is easily scripted, making it a perfect tool to use in automated scripts that you run at night via cron. You could run scripts to download nightly builds of Mozilla, or other actively developed software projects.

Wget is very useful when you want to download an entire Web tree — perhaps a documentation section of a Web site, or a site you are working on and want to archive a local copy of the site. For example, you can download the documentation for Wget from www.gnu.org. Enter the following command:

wget -r --level=0 -p -k  http://www.gnu.org/manual/wget/html_Chapter/wget_toc.html

-r turns on recursive retrieval.

--level=0 sets the depth of recursion to infinite. This will get the entire site.

-p downloads all page requisites, images, and so on, needed to display the page.

-k converts the links in the document to relative links that will work correctly from your hard drive.

This form of usage is very handy if you desire a local mirror of a Web site, or if you want to back up a remote site. Such a command can also be used in a shell script and called by cron nightly.

For additional information on Wget, please visit http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html.

To install Wget, simply type fink install wget, as shown in Figure 25-10.

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Figure 25-10: Installing GNU Wget with Fink.

GIMP

GIMP stands for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. GIMP is free software distributed by GNU. GIMP is basically a free implementation of Adobe Photoshop. Although GIMP is not as complete as Photoshop, it is quite capable. It does most of what you would want from a graphics program and considerably more than converting graphics between formats. It’s a handy piece of software to have installed, for those times that something comes in via email or otherwise, and you want to make simple changes to it. Figure 25-11 shows the GIMP at work. The project home page is located at www.gimp.org.

If you don’t have a copy of Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks installed on your system, the GIMP is invaluable software. Even if you do already have a full-featured image editor installed on your system, it is worth installing, as it is truly a fantastic offering from the free software community. It is interesting to see just how good free software can be.

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Figure 25-11: The GIMP in action.

Installing the GIMP can be very complicated, as there are many separate pieces of software that need to be built. Thankfully, Fink has GIMP in its library, so although installing GIMP is as simple as typing fink install gimp, there are more stages to this install than others we have seen so far This process takes quite a while, as there are a lot of software packages that require download. Though you’ll have to wait quite some time, the download process is completely automated by Fink.

Installing the GIMP on your system with Fink is a bit different than other software installs you’ve encountered so far. As the GIMP relies on many different software packages, you’ll have to answer some questions before continuing. Run the (now) traditional fink install gimp command.

Fink will need to know the answers to several questions. The first question regards how to handle GIF images. There are two available libraries, one with LZW and the other without. The two packages offer the same functionality; the distinction is due to politics and copyright issues. Either choice will result in a working GIMP. The second question is for Fink to know where and how X-Windows is installed on your system. Before Apple made X11 available for Mac OS X, installing X-Windows was generally a task that Fink would have been used for. In our case, we have installed our own copy, that is one that Fink has nothing to do with So we choose Option 1 which is a placeholder packing for xfree86. This simply tells Fink not to concern itself with the specifics of X-Windows, and to just assume that it is correctly installed. This is illustrated in Figure 25-12.

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Figure 25-12: Fink needs to have a few questions answered before installing the GIMP.

The GIMP is an X-Windows-based application. Therefore, to run the software, you first have to launch X11. X11 should be installed on your system. If X11 is not already installed, please refer to the section “Installing X11 For Mac OS X” earlier in this Chapter. X11 is located in your Applications folder. Launching it will automatically launch an application named xterm. xterm provides a window that looks almost exactly like a terminal window. In the xterm window, a command prompt appears. Type gimp at the prompt as shown in Figure 25-13.

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Figure 25-13: Launching the GIMP from an xterm.

When the GIMP is launched for the first time, a folder must be created in the user’s home directory, and another configuration must be done. the GIMP presents the following series of user installation dialog boxes that you will need to okay. Figures 25-14 through 25-18 show the dialog boxes. Click Continue in each box to confirm.

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Figure 25-14: The GIMP user installation splash screen.

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Figure 25-15: Creating your personal GIMP directory.

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Figure 25-16: Setting GIMP performance tuning options. Leave these at default values.

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Figure 25-17: Setting monitor resolution information for the GIMP.

When you are finished working with the GIMP, you can type Control-Q or choose Quit from the file menu in the main tool palette as shown in Figure 25-18.

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Figure 25-18: Choosing the Quit command from the GIMP’s main menu.

CinePaint (filmGimp)

CinePaint is a special version of GIMP, created by and for motion picture professionals. It is designed to work with 35mm film and other high-resolution images. CinePaint displays images in a 32-bit-per-channel color range. This means no resolution is lost from scanning the film and digitizing the footage. CinePaint can work with all standard image formats, and it supports industry-specific formats such as Industrial Light & Magic’s OpenEXR (www.openexr.com/) and Kodak’s Cineon (www.cineon.com). CinePaint is in use at many major effects studios, on feature films such as Harry Potter, 2 Fast, 2 Furious, Stuart Little II, Cats & Dogs, and many more. There is a feature list available at the projects home page at http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net:

CinePaint used to be known as filmGimp, and that is how Fink has it listed in its package list. To install CinePaint, simply type fink install filmgimp.




Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition
Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition
ISBN: 0764543997
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 290

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