Installing Open Source software on your Mac
So you just trashed your Windows PC and bought a Mac. Congratulations and welcome! Now, how about getting some cool software for free? Free you say? Well, read on!
If you've grown up on a Windows machine or even have been using a Mac since the old OS 9 days, "free" software to you probably means "shareware". Granted, that software is "free", but only in its price. A little history lesson first. Free and Open Source software (FOSS) is a completely different idea than shareware. It got its roots back in the 1980s when most businesses were using big Unix mainframes (mostly IBM) and paying oodles of money for a machine that, in today's world, isn't even as powerful as your cell phone.
Tired of this, Richard Stallman created the GNU project with the purpose of re-writing from scratch all the software on big Unix systems and making it available freely. There's one big difference though. By "freely", he meant that the source code would be made available and users could modify the software as they saw fit. There was one exception though: they had to release the source code to their contributions for everyone else to see as well. This is what is meant by Free Software: it gives its users freedom. It's not about being "free as in beer". In fact, you can charge people for it, so long as they get the source code. That leads to another group: people who release the source code for their software, generally known as the Open Source Initiative. While the source code for Free Software is available, it's not really the point of the movement. The point is that you can do what you want with it, so long as you give your contributions back. The Open Source folks don't mind if you don't give back, but the Free Software folks do. Their license, the GPL, lays this out, and in surprisingly readable form.
So now that you are vaguely familiar with the concepts of Open Source software and Free Software, how does it all tie in with your new Mac? You may not know it, but nearly every available operating system today uses some Open Source software. The most popular is the familiar TCP/IP networking stack. The core of Mac OS X is called Darwin, and is based heavily on the Open Source operating system Free BSD. Without that and many of the other cool stuff that in Open Source-land, your computer might not be as much fun.
What does it take to run some Open Source stuff on your Mac? Again, you already are, but you can get a boat-load more. To do this, you will need your Mac OS X install CD/DVD first. Pop it in the drive and when the Mac OS X install window comes up, scroll down and look for optional installs. Double click that and install X11 (a windowing environment for Unix). Also, look for Xcode and install that too. I'll explain why you need to install a development environment shortly.
The Mac OS X install DVD
With those two items installed, go to darwinports.com and download and install the latest version of Darwin ports. Darwin Ports emulates the Free BSD "ports" system for installing software. It's a bit like Add/Remove programs in Windows, but it actually compiles the source code for software for your machine, meaning it will run much faster. Cool, huh? Oh, remember when I said you had to install Xcode? This is why. Actually, you might be able to get away with just installing GCC (a compiler), but don't quote me on it.
With all that installed, go to Applications/Utilities and launch X11. You should get a terminal screen that kinda looks like a DOS prompt. Here's where the real action happens. The first thing to do is check for updates, so type 'sudo port -d selfupdate'. That should ask you for your password and run a command to update your Darwin Ports installation to the latest and greatest. If you get a "command not found" on the port command, you probably don't have it in your path. One weird thing I noticed when installing Mac OS X Tiger from scratch is that you do not get the .bashrc file in your home directory but you can simply copy over .bash_profile. Adding a directory to your path is outside the scope of this article but it's easy enough to figure out if you look around the Internet.
Self-updating the ports installation
With your ports installtion up to date, now it's time to install some goodies! One of my favorites is Ethereal, which allows you to capture and analyize network traffic. To install it, you'd just type 'sudo port install ethereal'. The cool thing about ports is that it automatically fetches and installs any software that your program needs (yes, it compiles it too). So, have some fun, poke around and enjoy the vast library of Open Source software out there on your Mac!