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X11 on Jaguar XBy Francine Schwieder |
You may have heard that one of the advantages of Apple switching to OS X, which is actually a UNIX flavor operating system, is that there are lots of free UNIX programs out there, which you will be able to download and put on your computer. Well, that's true. Sort of. But it isn't nearly as straight-forward as that. Many, perhaps most, of those free UNIX programs are part of the open source movement which has burgeoned around Linux, and Linux was designed and built to run on x86 computers. That's right, those generic Wintel boxes. The hardware is quite different and therefor so is the operating system, and so are the programs that run in the operating system. It turns out that those free programs need a lot of tinkering before they'll work on your Mac.
Some of them can be rebuilt to run from the Apple Terminal. They need to be recompiled, but one can do that if you have Apple's Developer Tools installed, either know some programming or are extremely lucky, and have a burning desire to be a system administrator. I watched my brother recompile a UNIX bench mark utility, a rather simple little program, so that it would run from the OS X Terminal. It was easy for him, as he casually opened some sort of source file and typed in a few adjustments, then issued Terminal commands to recompile it. I don't know about you, but I can't do any of those things, and even if I could I'm not really interested in UNIX utilities, the programs that are most likely to respond favorably to this, and are of great interest chiefly to sys admins. I want a graphics program, a word processor, that sort of thing. I realized that this route was not going to work for me. No doubt there are UNIX/Mac geeks scattered all over the place who are doing this, and offering the results as shareware. You can find their handiwork on the web, and I think that is probably the easiest way to harvest this particular OS X benefit.
But still--what about those other programs, the ones that do interesting things? Must we wait for someone to fix them? Well, if you're adventurous you can get some of them to work by installing a couple of things available from Apple, plus a few other downloadable goodies. First you'll need to install Developer Tools, which comes as a separate CD with the OS X installer. Next you need to be willing to download and install Apple's X11 Public Beta. This means you have a partition with not much on it except the Jaguar OS and Developer Tools, and no important data to lose. (I still can't believe people downloaded and used the Public Beta of Safari on their working drive--then cried all over the Apple message boards when it wiped out their Home directory under certain circumstance).
X11 is Apple's implementation of the XFree86 windowing system, which is what those free UNIX programs, the ones that actually do something interesting, were designed to work with. So I installed Developer Tools and X11 in Jaguar, and looked to see what I could do. There was a scientific calculator and clock, both of which worked when invoked from the X11 xterm window. That was nice, but not real exciting. I already have a much nicer menu bar clock, standard from Apple, and a very spiffy scientific calculator I downloaded called PCalc ($10 shareware from http://www.pcalc.com/). So I visited the GIMP web site (http://www.gimp.org/), home of the free Linux image editing program, which does for Linux users what Photoshop does for the rest of the world. But for the life of me I couldn't figure out what I needed to do. While poking around here and there I discovered there is a free UNIX text editing program, meant to do the sort of thing that Micro$oft Word does, called AbiWord. So I went to their web site and discovered there was an actual page for Mac OS X users (in fact their site identified my computer from its browser and then was able to tell me what I needed to do--to experience this miracle go to http://www.abisource.com/download/).
So I downloaded it. It came down as a dmg file, and promptly mounted on the desktop. Its README told me to drag the icon for the program to my Applications folder, which I did. I then launched X11, went to the Applications folder, opened the AbiSuite folder (with a custom icon, so at first I thought that WAS the program), double clicked on the XAbiWord icon inside, and voila--I was running a free UNIX program, one that does something, right there on my Mac. I then went to the xterm window, dragged to select some text, returned to the AbiWord window and clicked the middle button of my 3-button mouse. The selected text magically appeared in the document, just the way it does in Linux. I laughed aloud with delighted glee and exclaimed to the empty room, "It works! Cool!"
If the screen shot I took isn't too small, you may be able to see that things look a little odd. The Jag menu bar at the top has almost nothing in it, just the Apple, the X11 program menu, Edit and Window menus (which are for X11, NOT AbiWord), and that's pretty much it (the clock is at the far end of the menu bar). All the menu items you use with the program are in the program's own window, and they don't look Mac-like at all and, when you drop them down, they're even less Mac-like. But they work. Furthermore, if you type command-N you get a new AbiWord document, and if you click the minimize button the window goes to the Dock, and the icons for both X11 and AbiWord were also in the Dock. In other words, X11 is integrated with Jaguar. Way to go Apple!