The Fink project ports open source Unix applications to Mac OS X which you can download either in binary format or with the full source to compile them locally on your computer. As I made a clear start with my iMac yesterday and as I am likely to need quite a few open source packages, I’ll reinstall fink and log my actions here for future reference. First we need the Fink 0.6.2 binary installer which we unpack in the usual way (at the end of which a Terminal window pops up to ask you whether it’s good create a .profile, just say Yes). After this the install process goes ahead for a while (processing Fink and optimizing the HD and system performance) and we are done!

Usually one controls Fink via the command line : sudo fink install package-name will install the package and if you want to remove it at a later stage just type sudo fink remove package-name. One can also browse through a list of packages via sudo dselect but as I skrewed up earlier I am now going for a graphical user-interface approach called FinkCommander.

I choose for the binary disk image download which presents no problem and copy the resulting FinkCommander both to my Application Folder and to my Dock. More help on the FinkCommander is available here and there is also a Fink documentation page which should contain all the info I need when I’m going to install some packages (soon).

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