Mac OS X For Unix Geeks, 4th Edition

Chapter 12. Fink

Fink is essentially a port of the Debian Advanced Package Tool (APT) with some frontends and its own centralized collection site, which stores the packaged binaries, source code, and patches you need to build software on Mac OS X. The Fink package manager allows you to install a package (a ported Unix software application or library) and lets you choose whether to install it from source or a binary package file. Consistent with Debian, binary package files are in the dpkg format with a .deb extension and are managed with the ported Debian tools dpkg and apt-get.

Fink also provides tools that create a .deb package from source. It maintains a database of installed software that identifies packages by a combination of name, version number, and revision number. Moreover, Fink understands dependencies, uses rsync to propagate software updates, supports uninstallation, and makes it easy to see available and installed packages. You can use Fink to install over a thousand freely available Unix packages that will run on Mac OS X. Fink also recognizes and supports Apple’s X11 implementation, based on the X.Org X Window System, for running X11 applications.

Fink installs itself and all of its packages (with the exception of X11) in a directory named /sw, thus completely separating itself from the main /usr system directory. If problems occur with Fink-installed packages, you can simply delete the entire /sw directory tree without affecting your system.

Installing Fink

Before installing ...