Tag: fink

Leopard ahoy!

Now that fink has finally started to show some maturing support for Mac OS X 10.5, I’ve upgraded on scud.

I re-used my home directory from Tiger, without any help of migration tools other than chown. Mail.app upgraded its data and so far everything’s gone smoothly.

Managing users has changed a bit: you have to Ctrl+click the account in System Preferences and select “Advanced Options” to change the usual POSIX fields. If you’re serious, check out dscl(1):

 dscl . -read /Users/$(whoami)

Looks like Apple’s Terminal.app has improved a great deal, almost surpassing iTerm. However, it still fails short in the tab apartment: AFAICS Terminal.app’s tab titles always display the process name and don’t respond to the usual xterm escape codes, and the visual style of the tabbar isn’t nearly as nice as iTerm’s Aqua style.

Trying to switch to fink unstable doesn’t work as advertised: you must use the CVS method of selfupdate (rsync being the default).

After Software Updating to 10.5.4, X11.app broke.

1/07/08 4:04:01 PM org.x.X11[12697] /usr/X11/libexec/x11-exec: Unable to find application for org.x.X11

Since Apple’s official updates are lagging by more than 6 months, it’s better just to get it from the xquartz project.

Photoshop doesn’t like case-sensitive filesystems, but there is a (tedious) workaround. I totally agree that this is just laziness on the part of the Adobe devs: it would take 1 man less than a day to do the appropriate case consistency changes given the source code: there’s nothing to break.

fink’s TeX packages

Fink’s support for TeX packages is poor: there aren’t many in the distribution and it’s not clear how best to add more. I ran into this while creating a fink package for TIPA, which I needed for a linguistics assignment.

They’re still using teTeX 3.0, while the rest of the world has moved on to TeXlive: in fact, tipa is part of TeXlive so if they’d made the move I wouldn’t even have to create a package.

Unlike debian, which has a TeX packaging policy, fink packaging of TeX seems quite ad-hoc. It’s hard to see where the correct place to install to is: README.fink only mentions ~/Library/texmf for users.

The only example of an “extra” package I could find was latex-beamer. That package installs itself to /sw/share/texmf-local. Some people seem to think this directory (or more correctly, /sw/etc/texmf.local which is the symlinked) is reserved for user-managed TeX packages. If official fink packages are installing themselves here, then that’s not the case.

Anyway, here’s the resulting finkinfo.