Apple OsX

It is June of 2008, and a mac-book has entered my life, left behind by a coworker who went on to a bigger and better job. This is my first experience in the MAC world, and away we go. After just a few hours late one afternoon, I am impressed.

It has a Core 1 duo, 2.0 Ghz processor (32 bit), 2G of RAM, and an 80G hard drive. Looks like a DVD reader, Gigabit ethernet, and the mac wireless "airport". It comes with Mac OsX 10.5 Leopard installed on it. Both wireless and wired networking work without hassle. After a little playing around I figure out how to get a terminal window. (You hit the "flower key" and space and you get a little entry dingus and type in terminal -- then you put the terminal icon on the dock). From there I find ruby, perl, python, even the vi editor (well vim anyway). Pretty impressive for just a vanilla install from the distribution DVD.

It seems that to get the C compiler, I need to go get Xcode 3.0. This is easily done (and free), requiring me first to sign up as an "apple developer", which seems painless. One really can't complain about this (in contrast to microsoft and sun who make their C compiler an expensive added cost extra). Xcode gives me their fancy development environment, and their own customized gcc 4.0. This download is pretty painless, and I get all kinds of the usual gnu development tools, and presumably all the header files and such. Maybe even a Java SDK. I even get CHUD!! (Whatever that is - apparently some kind of profiling tool).

DMG files

These are mac specific disk images. They say they can be treated just like a disk, or burned to CD or DVD. The claim is that they can be converted to an ISO image (on a mac) via:

hdiutil convert filename.dmg -format UDTO -o file.iso

The usual drill with these (I am told) is that they show up as little white disk icons, you double click to open it, and then drag stuff you want to some folder (typically /Applications). Many disk images have a built in Application alias folder that you are intended to drag to to do the install. After that toss the dmg in the wastebasket.

Ports and packages

I am told that there is no "one stop shopping" or a single point source for open source add-ons for the Mac. Here are some recommended sources to check out:

Installing gtk2

I found that darwinports has an up to date version (2.12.9), so I set myself up to use ports and grab it from there. For details, follow this link, but notice that I do not use Darwin ports to get gtk any more, see below.

Starting over, snow leopard

Well, somewhere after the above, my hard drive blew a gasket and I had to start all over (with another 80G drive). I reloaded OSX (then leopard), loaded Xcode, got a different gtk2 (not from darwinports). Namely: Gtk-Framework-2.14-LATEST.dmg. This comes (came?) from the GTK+ OS X Framework site.

Some time later, I upgraded to snow leopard, and it seems like most of the Xcode components vanished (like cc and make), so now I am reinstalling Xcode 3.2.1 which says it knows about snow leopard.

Installing Xcode

It is October 17, 2009. I have a file called xcode321_10m2003_developerdvd.dmg from the apple developer site. It comes with a 5 page PDF entitled About Xcode. All I do is to copy the 788M dmg file to my system, use finder to find it in Todays stuff, double click on it, then double click on Xcode.mpkg and away goes the installer. I install everything excpet the 10.4 compatibility tools. (The say it will occupy 2.4G on my hard drive). Now I have cc and make again !!! And it works without having to reinstall the GTK framework, but I do get more compiler warnings now (from my code mind you, so this is my problem to clean up).

The documentation says that Xcode installs into /Developer and indeed, there is lots of stuff there. The components (like make) are in /usr/bin/make and so forth. This version of Xcode give you gcc 4.2. All of this looks good.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org