How to open programs downloaded by Fink

[Phil St. Romain]

- very much a newbie at this -

I've got Fink up and running and used it to install Xfree86 (rootless). Using OroborOSX as window manager, I've been successful in opening a few programs that came with Orobor.

So next I used Fink to download/install/compile AbiWord and xdigger. The folders are there in sw/share/ but I don't know how to open the applications; there doesn't seem to be any.

How does one open an app using Orobor, or any other way?

(Going on the notion here that the only dumb questions are the ones you don't ask.)

[griffman]

Off the top of my head (no Mac at work anymore, argh!), just make sure you type 'rehash' first, and then you should be able to use them from the Terminal within XDarwin.

The programs don't live in /sw/share, I think they're all in /sw/bin or similar. Once you've "rehashed," just try typing "ab<tab>" and you should see the possible completions, one of which will be abiword.

Remember to do this in the XDarwin terminal, not the OS X terminal.

If all of the above is wrong, it's because I'm getting old and the memory is failing ... or because I have to look at XP all day long and it's driving me crazy!

-rob.

[nosaj56]

Originally posted by griffman
no Mac at work anymore, argh!
-rob.

You'll have to change the "About Mac OS X Hints" page! I'm sorry for your loss. (:D)

[sbur]

griffman is right.

When you install something, rehash goes through and finds the things in your PATH (if you got fink running, you already have /sw/bin in your path).
Then, when you launch your window manager (oroborosx in your case) you must open a new terminal (called xterm in orobor). I think orobor has xterm as an "open when launched" default..just like the little annoying eyes that follow your mouse cursor around.

Then type the name of the program in the xterm window. Unlike OSX, you have to have the mouse cursor somewhere over the "active" window.

You can set up aliases for your frequently used programs just like you would for your OS X terminal...infact, it reads the same .tcsh or .bash or whatever (I still use the Cshell variant that 10.0 came with). So just add it to that file.

Happy *nixing. :)

[griffman]

Originally posted by nosaj56
You'll have to change the "About Mac OS X Hints" page! I'm sorry for your loss. (:D) I'm not giving up yet! I still intend to get one in here, somehow, someway ...

-rob.

[Phil St. Romain]

Thanks gents. Success. I ran the rehash command in xterm, then typed in AbiWord and the application opened.

I can't find the app in /sw/bin/ however, or nothing that I can make an alias to place in the Launch Menu Items of OroborOSX.

Any suggestions?

[griffman]

Type "which abiword" and you'll see where it is.

-rob.

[Craig R. Arko]

Open a normal terminal window; type 'which AbiWord' in it. What path do you get back? In /sw/bin/ you should see: AbiWord (which is a script), AbiWord_d and AbiWord_s.

Edit: Man, he's fast! Better put him to work on the 2nd edition. :D

[Phil St. Romain]

We have a second, ladies and gentlemen. Do I hear a third?

Going once, twice . . . ;)

Thanks, gang. It's pretty cool to run those apps, but I've got to admit that AbiWord ain't no Appleworks or MS Word. Still, the price is right. I'll give Open Office a try sometime and see what that's like.

[griffman]

Sometimes I feel guilty about not participating in the forums enough, so I come in one day and blitz them, then go back in my corner and work on the main site again ;-).

-rob.

[nosaj56]

Originally posted by griffman
Sometimes I feel guilty about not participating in the forums enough, so I come in one day and blitz them, then go back in my corner and work on the main site again ;-).

-rob.

How sad... Now, go to your corner and don't come out until you finish the Geeklog upgrade. :D

[thatch]

Rob, your dedication is muchly appreciated. Thanks for another great year and Happy New Year too.

Side note: My yearly contribution$ will be forthcoming to you shortly. I hope others will do the same if they haven't already.

[Glanz]

Originally posted by Phil St. Romain
We have a second, ladies and gentlemen. Do I hear a third?

Going once, twice . . . ;)

Thanks, gang. It's pretty cool to run those apps, but I've got to admit that AbiWord ain't no Appleworks or MS Word. Still, the price is right. I'll give Open Office a try sometime and see what that's like.

Here's a third!!!!:)

I really like Open Office B U T it takes up as much space as an operating system.... Yet again, I wrote about 15 articles for extremetech with it, and my editors are all on M$ Orifice. They didn't notice anything. Formatting, graphics, and the rest went very well indeed. When saving text I chose MS Word format, and in spite of the usual warning; "you may lose some formatting and/or text"..., I never lost one single letter or style. But the humongous 100MB plus download is just too much, IMHO.

[sao]

Phil,

Also, you can enable entering X11 commands in the Terminal.app "when XFree86 is running" if you write at the beginning of your ~/.cshrc or ~/.tcshrc files:

setenv DISPLAY :0.0

Then, when you type 'gimp' in "Terminal.app" the corresponding X11 binary will open in XFree86. (If you start the app. from an 'xterm' DISPLAY is automatically set)


You could also set the 'XDarwin.app' to start up when you login in the Login Panel of the System Preferences and then add to your ~/.cshrc or ~/.tcshrc files:

if (! $?DISPLAY) then
setenv DISPLAY :0.0
endif

"This will set DISPLAY automatically in every shell. It doesn't override the current value when DISPLAY is already set, though. This way you can still run X11 applications remotely or through ssh with X11 tunneling".


Cheers...


PS: BTW, just came back from a holiday...Happy New Year...!

[sbur]

Cool tip, sao. When I get my new iBook set up, I'll incorporate that into the .tcshrc file. Could make my life a lot easier as I hate working in the xterm window! I'm literate enough to know what I can do with it, but not always how to do it...the terminal.app is much more well behaved, imho. But then again, I used to think vi was a poorly behaved program until I finally learned how to use it...:)

[Phil St. Romain]

Yes, sao, thanks for the tip. I'm very much a newbie with Unix, so I'm not sure I followed it completely, but will give it a try next time I boot into the partition (actually a firewire partition) that I used to install Xfree86.

As you can tell, I'm not even clear about what terminology to use--X11, X86, etc.

AbiWord is actually a decent word processor, I'm finding. It's not as polished and fully-featured as Appleworks or Word, but it'll do 98% of what most people ever need to do.

Now how to get things to print? The printer listing is lpr and nothing happens. Perhaps I'll see what threads might be helpful on this or start a new one if needed since that's introducing a topic beyond starting programs downloaded by Fink.

Thanks, all, for your help and feedback.

[sbur]

Originally posted by Phil St. Romain
Yes, sao, thanks for the tip. I'm very much a newbie with Unix, so I'm not sure I followed it completely, but will give it a try next time I boot into the partition (actually a firewire partition) that I used to install Xfree86.

As you can tell, I'm not even clear about what terminology to use--X11, X86, etc.



X11 = Xwindows. sometimes just refered to as X. (A problem when talking about "X" on BBS dedicated to OS X...)
x86 = chip architecture used by Intell and AMD, for example.

XFree86 is the name of the Xwindow version you install. It was based on the FreeBSD system, and (I believe) 86 refers to the year the project was started...but that's a guess.

[Don Benot]

I have also installed OroborosX and Fink. I cannot run Fink from the command line.

[Dons-iBook:~] church% fink
fink: Command not found.
[Dons-iBook:~] church%

I can use Fink Commander.

Oroborosx runs okay. I've installed LAME and AbiWord using Fink Commander. I cannot run either one of them from the command line in OroborosX or XDarwin. Any clues for me out there?

Don

[sao]

Don Benot,

You need to set up your fink installation so that your shell is aware of the /sw/ tree.

Write at the beginning of your ~/.cshrc or ~/.tcshrc files:

source /sw/bin/init.csh


Cheers...

[Don Benot]

Bless you.

I thought I did that. Must have been on my desktop. I've had it working there. It also helps to type "AbiWord" and not "abiword". Doh!

Thanks again,
Don