talbotlucas.org: a word to the wise is sufficient

Over the weekend it became clear that I really didn't have enough space in the root partition of my OS X machine to upgrade to 10.2.4. I had been warned to set aside a full 10 GB the last time I rebuilt. I didn't. I paid the price. Had to rebuild.

The good news, beyond the numerous improvements in 10.2.4, is that I was finally able to straighten out my X11 installation. Over the course of many months, I had installed XDarwin, Fink, Apple's X11 beta, and finally DarwinPorts over and on top of each other enough times that nothing really worked too well anymore.

I had switched from Fink to DarwinPorts thinking that it would, in the long run, be a better solution as it came from Apple (more or less) and mirrored the way FreeBSD Ports works. FreeBSD Ports had always seemed a much more elegant system than any of the various "package managers" developed for Linux. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough packages ported to DarwinPorts yet. Fink definitely has it all for you, ready to go.

After I installed Apple's X11 and Fink, which went flawlessly, I decided to take another look at FinkCommander. I had tried this in the past, but it had a fairly confusing interface and didn't work particularly well. All that has now changed. FC works fabulously well! Point-and-click installation of The GIMP, the GNU Krell Monitors (on OS X!), and PfaEdit. More about that later.

What's the point of all this? Simple. Most all of the interesting software available on Linux really is now available with just a point-and-click install on OS X. Yes, I could spend the hours needed to download, configure, and install it all by hand. But who has the time? Congrats and thanks to all those that made this happen. I couldn't be happier!