CryptoBox
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Fink for OSX.
You may have heard of Fink. But if not, you're missing out on a great opportunity to turn your OS X computer into a real Unix workstation. This means that you can easily install and use all of those cool open-source tools that Linux and BSD snobs are always talking about.
Fink is a very creative combination of "packaging" tools for two different Unix-ish operating systems. First, bow-down to the power of FreeBSD because FreeBSD has an incredible system called (confusingly) "Ports". It's basically a way for you to very quickly install any of about 4,000 open-source (free) programs that you may have heard of whithout having to waste your time searching for software dependencies and code libraries. Debian Linux took this basic idea and brought it to the Linux world. And now Fink brings Debian's
"Packages" (same as "Ports") system to Darwin, the BSD-based Unix operating system at the heart of Apple's OS X.
I'm installing Fink now. Click back here on the "Comments" link below to see how it went. So far it seems very similar to installs on FreeBSD, which is to say that so far there are none of the stupid missing library or broken link problems that ultimately led me away from RedHat Linux.
Comments:
One lesson I've learned so far: The official Nessus instructions for installing Nesson on OS X are the reason I'm installing Fink. They say to put "source /sw/bin/init.sh" into your shell configurations files (.profile and .bashrc). The only problem is that it does not tell you where these files are. Anyone used any other stand-alone Linux/Unix system would expect these files to live in your home directory. However, on OS X (Panther a.k.a 10.3.3) they live in /etc but are not dotfiles. They are /etc/profile and /etc/bashrc for sh shells and interactive bash shells respectively.
If all of the above freaks you out, don't despair, any Unixish buddy of yours can help you do this and you'll suddenly realize that all you're doing is putting a line of text into a text file that lives in a folder (directory) somewhere. The two files mentioned above are basically just preferences or settings type files.
If all of the above freaks you out, don't despair, any Unixish buddy of yours can help you do this and you'll suddenly realize that all you're doing is putting a line of text into a text file that lives in a folder (directory) somewhere. The two files mentioned above are basically just preferences or settings type files.
FYI if you're installing Nessus on OS X 10.3.3 you better install openssl first. Assuming you installed fink already, just do this: "fink install openssl". That will do it. Then you run the nessus client by running X11 (in Applications/Utilities) and typing the full path to nessus which is probably /usr/local/bin/nessus. If you did everything right, the nessus X11 GUI window will suddently appear.
Post a Comment
