Fink and Fink Commander
The Fink project ’s goal is to port important Open Source and Free Software to Darwin and Mac OS X. To that end, the project provides the Fink package management system, which makes it easy to install, upgrade, and uninstall Open Source software.
Fink is based on the Debian tools dpkg, dselect, and apt-get (described earlier in this chapter). It uses these tools to manage downloading, building, and installation of available packages. The current default location for installation is the /sw directory; this name does not conflict with any of the other standard Unix or Mac OS X installation directories, which keeps package management simple.
The Fink project is based at http://fink.sourceforge.net. From there you can download the fink command-line program and other tools and start downloading the packages that are available.
Fink Commander provides an Aqua-based GUI interface to Fink. The web starting point is http://finkcommander.sourceforge.net. A binary version of Fink Commander is included when you download Fink, so you don’t have to build Fink Commander yourself.
For more information, including screenshots of Fink Commander, see the two web sites just cited.
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