[vox-tech] Unix Utilities>OS X= Mystery

[Matt Holland]

George,

So, if I understand you correctly, you would like to run The GIMP in Mac 
OS X, and you seem to have some kind of CD that contains some 
distribution or other of The GIMP... and it's weird somehow.

Here's what I would suggest (note that this will work best if you have 
access to a fast net connection): if you don't have Fink yet, get it 
(http://fink.sourceforge.net).  Go to the web page, read the necessary 
documentation (http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/users-guide/index.php), 
and install Fink.  Pay special attention to "Getting X11 Sorted Out" in 
the user guide, as you'll need the X Window System in order to run The 
GIMP.  Personally, I run Apple's X11 public beta on my Mac, but you can 
also get it from xdarwin.org or through Fink itself.

Once you have a working Fink installation and X11 is installed, go to a 
terminal and type "sudo apt-get install gimp" at the prompt.  You will 
be prompted for your password, and then most likely presented with a 
list of other packages that need to be installed; tell it to go ahead, 
and sit back.  If the command line makes you squeamish, look into 
FinkCommander.  I don't use it, but supposedly it provides a gui for 
package management with Fink.

Assuming all goes well and The GIMP gets installed without any errors 
(there's no reason it shouldn't), you can launch GIMP from a terminal by 
typing "gimp &".  Note that X11 needs to be running in order for GIMP to 
run, and the terminal that you launch it from needs to know which X 
display to use.  What this means is that you need to either launch it 
from an xterm, or you need to configure Terminal so that there's an 
environment variable called "DISPLAY" that is set to ":0.0".  If you use 
bash as your command shell in Terminal (this isn't the default), then 
you can accomplish this by including the following lines in your .bashrc:

if [ -n $DISPLAY ]
then
    DISPLAY=:0.0
fi

export DISPLAY

This assumes that Terminal is running as a login shell; if you use csh 
or something else, I don't know what the proper syntax would be.

If this all sounds like Greek to you, then you need to learn a little 
bit about Unix, or go another route.  There's also a macgimp.org, but I 
don't know anything about that, so you'd be on your own.

Ah yes, almost forgot, I think it's possible for OS X to not have the 
"BSD subsystem" (or whatever they call it) installed, that is, many of 
the core Unix utilities could be missing.  If that's the case with your 
installation, then you'll need to install it.

Good luck,
Matt

Gt wrote:
> Hi, good folks
>     i've a terrible itch to get into the GIMP (image 
> manipulation prog.) I have the computer to handle 40mb files
> with dispatch, and i have this CD from Clyogistics. "..all
> ya gotta do is click a button, ya da da......). Of course
> the author of that little piece has gotta be Pollyana,
> herself.
>     So i pop in the CD, d click on the icon and it says just
> click on the desired pkg. Sure. I clicked on gimp, and i get
> four files in a subfolder...like: Perl< darwin< auto,
> foundation.pm, PerlObjCBridge.pm. Nothing resembling image
> editing is possible. The MAC gripes that there ain't no Opr
> Sys.
>     Here is a list of the stuff included in the CD. Perhaps
> someone like Henry House could hazard a guess as to what
> other hoops i gotta jump thru to get this business uo and
> running.
> 
> audio/ comms/databases/ devel/ editors/ emulators/ games/
> graphics/ irc/ lang/ mail/ math/ net/ news/ print/ sci/
> security/ sysutils/ textproc/ www/ x11.
> 
> Yessss, i tried bsdmall.com and get no response. Sure would
> apreciate i little help. The folks at MACnexus advised me to
> buy PhotoShop 7 (with a rolling eye icon, yet). but i'm
> already halfway into the poor house.
>     Would it help to say "pleeze"?       George Tranter
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