[vox-tech] macos x questions

[Matt Holland]

Pete,

Oh boy, time to earn my keep!  Unfortunately, I'm not in front of my Mac 
at the moment, so I won't be able to fill in all of the details just now.

gcc is the default compiler of OS X, but it's been modified a bit by 
Apple, and is not installed by default.  It's also not documented very 
well in man/info pages, so sometimes you're left guessing about the 
differences between vanilla gcc and Apple gcc.  You have to install the 
Apple Developer Tools package, which is provided on CD with the OS, or 
can be downloaded from developer.apple.com (they make you "register"). 
It does come with make, but I believe that it's probably BSD make, since 
most of the utilities come from BSD.

I don't use vim, so I don't know if it's there by default.  Gnuplot is 
not there by default.

But... there's good news.  There is a project called Fink 
(fink.sourceforge.net) that is aimed at porting as much open source 
software as possible to Darwin/OS X.  It's a very mature project now, 
and you can install Gnu make (that is, if it really is BSD make that's 
installed by default; I'll do some fact checking tomorrow when I get 
into my office), gnuplot, vim, gnu fileutils (the default ones are BSD, 
so things that you may be used to like 'ls --color' aren't there).  And 
bash, and, ..., and....  Actually, bash is there by default in 10.2 
(Jaguar), but was not in 10.0 or 10.1, hence its availability through Fink.

I can't say enough nice things about fink, really.  It uses a port of 
apt-get for package management, so you'll feel at home there.  Of course 
you'll need to get yourself admin privileges to install it.

There is also a terminal emulator that runs in Aqua (it lives in 
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).

So, you should really be able to make yourself at home in OS X.

Matt

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> i've never seen mac os x, but it looks like i may have to use one this
> summer for work.   i have some questions about it:
> 
> does it have gcc?  vim?  gnuplot?  gnu make?
> 
> is there a shell i can use (preferably bash)?  or is the whole operating
> system point and click like windows?
> 
> pete
>