Seamlessly integrate your favorite Linux apps with OSX

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Under the polished look and feel of Apple’s Tiger OSX operating system lie all the ruggedness and power of a Unix based system. In this post I show you how you can seamlessly integrate your favorite Linux applications in to the OSX world using nothing but software that you already have, or that you can download for free.
XCode Tools and X11 Server
	The first step is to install Apple’s own XCode tools. These come with every Tiger DVD but are not installed by default. You just have to double click the installation icon and follow the easy step by step instructions. If you’re a software developer, chances are you have already installed it anyway. In particular, this will give you a gcc installation that you can use to build the other applications you might want to use.
	Since we will want to run graphical Linux applications, we will also need to install an X11 server. Once again, apple provides its own X11.app, with every OSX DVD, but fails to install it by default, so you’ll have to do it by hand. X11 has the annoying habit of starting “xterm” when you load it, so you might want to edit “xinitrc” and comment out the “xterm” line to avoid that. I set X11 to be loaded at boot time, since I normally use several X11 applications during my work day. You can do this by simply right clicking X11’s icon on the Dock while it is running and selecting “Open at Login” in the little menu that pops up. This menu is extremely useful, since you can customize it to include launchers for your favorite apps and use it as a “Start” menu. As an alternative, you can download XDarwin’s X11 server, which, unfortunately, last time I checked had some limitations that kept it from working with some applications such as Mathwork’s Matlab.
Fink And Fink Commander
	After installing XCode and X11, we are ready to start getting our hands dirty. We start by installing “the Fink Project” basic software. These are nothing but the basic UNIX tools ported to work on the Mac. Simply download the Disk Image from http://www.finkproject.org/download/index.php?phpLang=en and follow the on screen instructions. With your basic installation, you should also receive a copy of the “Fink Commander” a nifty GUI that we will be using on the rest of this tutorial. If for some reason this doesn’t install by default, simply download it from http://finkcommander.sourceforge.net/. Fink Commander is, basically, a GUI for the command line tool “fink”, a modified version of the well known “apt-get”. When you fire up the Fink Commander, you will be greated by a table listing all the available packages. By default, the list only includes stable packages, soyu might have to go to the preferences pane and select “Use unstable packages” under the Fink option pane. I usually select this option, since some of my favorite apps are listed as “unstable”.
	You can now go through the table and locate the package you want to install, or simply search for it using the search box locted on the top right hand corner of the FC’s window. When you find it, simply right click on it and select the installation method you want to use, “Binary” or from “Source”. (Click on the thumbnail on the left to view the full image.) Unfortunately, not all packages have binaries readily available or, in some instances, the binary version is older, so you might have to go through the time consuming process of installing from source in some cases.
	After you select a package to be installed, Fink determines all the dependencies if any, and asks you if you want to go through with the installation. (Click on the thumbnail on the left to view the full image.) If you answer yes, it will start to download all the necessary packages from the Fink server and proceed to install them. You can keep tabs on what it is doing in the are below the package list. There are several packages you may want to install, in particular: autocutsel This small utility makes sure your applications clipboard and Tiger’s clipboard are kept in sync. kde-base This serves as a base to all KDE packages and provides several useful utilities such as the “Konsole”, “Kate”, etc… gawk An extremely powerful command line tool. You can read more about it here gimp The best open source image editor. gv or some other postscript viewer so you can avoid having to convert everything to pdf before opening it in “Preview” xemacs “Everybody’s” favorite text editor. xmgrace An excellent 2D plotting program.
XDroplets
	Next, we download Martin Fuhrer’s XDroplets, a large collection of native OSX launchers for the most commonly used X11 applications. Simply download the whole package, and drag the ones you want to your dock or Applications folder. You can safely delete all the others. The package also includes a simple “XDroplet Factory” that will let you create your own XDroplets.
Finally
	If you followed all the instructions and everything went as planned (you can refer to the respective websites if you run in to any problems) you should be able to seamlessly use all the glory of UNIX/Linux open source software a long side your favorite OSX applications. (Click on the thumbnail on the left to view the full image.) If you have any questions, of if something is not clear, please drop me a line in the comment box below.