Using Fink
July 30, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
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Categories: OSX, Puter Stuff
I download Fink 0.8.1 from the local Seattle Sourceforge mirror. Installation was as straight forward as any other binary installer for OSX and I followed the post install instructions as dictated.
The Fink Commander GUI wasn’t installed into the Applications folder by default. This was mentioned in the documentation, but seems it should be a check box option from the installer GUI to begin with. The application is similar in concept to Synaptic, which some Linux users may be familiar with.
[Click on the image for a larger screenshot.] You can see the command being issued in the bottom left of the application - it is apt-get - sweet. The top right has the familiar search, which was surprisingly quick. Of course my first application search was for wget as mentioned in a previous post, I can’t believe it’s missing from OSX. I right-clicked on wget, choose to install the binary from the menu which appeared. A few short seconds later I now have wget available from my CLI.
Apt seems to be working from the console just as I would expect. A quick console command of: sudo apt-cache search php - yields the familiar quick and thorough results that Yum always failed to provide me.
One point of interest is that Fink must be installed for each user which is a possible drawback. I haven’t read the comprehensive looking FAQ or plethora of documentation yet to know the reasoning for this. It appears that the Fink Project team has put alot of work into this and it shows.
And that ladies and gentlemen is what it, is all about.
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I’m happy to hear Fink “binaries” are now available for IntelMac.