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Upgrading, Part 4: Panther, Fink, X11, and XEmacs

I’ve been having problems with Panther, Fink, and X11; I’m trying to get XEmacs installed. Fink 0.6.1 is supposed to be Panther compatible, and is supposed to recognize the Apple X11 that ships with Panther. But when I tried to install xemacs via dselect, it asked for an X11 implementation. The system-xfree86 package used in Fink on OS X 10.2 as a placeholder is no longer available, since fink is supposed to recognize X11 automatically.

I was pulling my hair out. I finally searched the fink-users mailing list archive, and found someone else having the same issue. Someone who, like me, missed the relevent FAQ entry. It seems you need the X11 SDK from the XCode CD installed, as well as X11.

But that still didn’t solve my problem. After trying much of everything, I posted on the fink-users Mailing List, and got some additional help (Thanks to Peter O’Gorman for his help). It seems that for now at least, dselect is broken, and so you need to use apt-get. All in all, getting this all up and running has been a hassle; although I’m sure this will improve since I know the Fink contributors are continually working on the Panther ports/enhancements. To save others some hassle, here it all is for the search engines:

How to Install XEmacs (or other X11 apps) for Apple’s X11, using Fink 0.6.1 on Panther.

This is geared for XEmacs, but should apply to other X11 apps as well.

1. If you already installed Fink, and it tried to install XFree86, you need to get Fink to remove XFree86, and then reinstall Apple’s X11 and the X11 SDK. Instructions for removing XFree86 are in Section 8.12 of the Fink FAQ, instructions to install X11 and the SDK are next.
2. Install Apple’s X11. If you didn’t do this when installing Panther, you can fink it on Panther CD 3 (Packages Folder).
3. Install the X11 SDK. If you didn’t do this when installing the Developer Tools, you can do install it from the XCode CD. You don’t even have to install all of the Developer Tools… just look in the Packages Folder.
4. Install Fink. I used the binary installer for 0.6.1 from the Fink Download Page and it worked fine.
5. Check your config. We’ll be using apt-get, so check /sw/etc/apt/sources.list. You should see a line beginning with deb. It should contain “10.3″. If not, you’ll have to edit it it, here’s what mine looked like when fixed (all one line):

   deb http://us.dl.sourceforge.net/fink/direct_download 10.3/release main

6. Update your package list. apt-get update
7. Test an XEmacs install. type apt-get -s install xemacs. This will give you a list of packages that will be installed, like this:

   The following extra packages will be installed: dlcompat gdbm-shlibs libjpeg-shlibs libpng3-shlibs libtiff-shlibs xaw3d-shlibs xemacs-base-pkg xemacs-efs-pkg

8. Check those packages. You should not see xfree86, xfree86-base, etc. If you do, something is amiss. If you see dlcompat, make a note of it.
9. Install xemacs. apt-get install xemacs
10. Possible followup step. If you saw “dlcompat” earlier as a package to be installed, I recommend one more step. When I did this install, dlcompat failed to trigger an install of dlcompat-shlibs, which is a dependancy. Just do it yourself: apt-get install dlcompat-shlibs

That should do it; it got me running XEmacs. Good luck! Please sumbit any corrections via the comments link below.

Upgrading, Part 3

Well, that went well. I repartitioned my drive, and reinstalled Panther. As soon as it was done, I installed the Developer tools. When this was finished, I used Swap Cop to move my swap folder to the partition I created for it. This worked perfectly.

I then followed these instuctions to complete the process of installing OS X on multiple partitions. I skipped the parts dealing with swap files, since Swap Cop took care of that. I also found that the instructions for hiding the extra volumes (using /Developer/Tools/SetFile) from the desktop didn’t quite work as advertised. The first time I installed Panther (before I repartitioned), the volumes weren’t hidden after adding the commands to /etc/rc. I tested them manually from Terminal, and they worked, so I moved them to nearer the end of the file, and all was well. This time I started them near the end of the file, but it didn’t work. I ran them by hand, and now they are hidden. I’ll probably remove them from /etc/rc and see if the volumes return. I’m guessing SetFile makes permament changes, and doesn’t need to be run at every startup.

I’ve gotten Mail restored. In addition to a backup of ~username/Library/Mail, you also need a backup of ~username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist. Firebird 0.7.1 is installed (along with Tabbrowser Extentions), and my bookmarks are restored. NetNewsWire is installed, and my subscriptions restored. Restoring com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist works much better than importing an OPML file.

Now I’m building Fink 0.6.1 from the tarball. It’s supposed to play nice with 10.3, and detect the presence of X11, but that didn’t happen when I installed from binaries. So, I’ll try the build source route. I created /Applications/sw to house Fink, and a symlink for it as /sw. This will let Fink live on the Applications partition, and still be accessible via the recomended path. The binary installer will handle this automatically if you go that route.

So, in addition to a 750meg swap partition, my drive layout and usage breaks down like this:

/dev/disk0s4              5.9G   3.8G   2.0G    66%    /
/dev/disk0s6              5.9G   440M   5.4G     7%    /Applications
/dev/disk0s8               24G   4.3G    20G    18%    /Users

So far, so good. And Expose still rocks.

(UPDATE) Warning: Before you decide to partition your drive, read why I am using a single partition again. If you do partition, be sure to make your System partition big enough. Some applications (e.g., GarageBand) put files into /Library, which is on your System partition. GarageBand + JamPack put 4.5G into /Library.

Pantherus Interuptus

After successfully installing Panther, I think I’m going to have to nuke it and re-install Panther. I only allowed 4 gig for the OS partition, which Disk Utility rounded down to 3.9. This doesn’t seem to leave quite enough room for the Developer Tools. I figure it’s better to reinstall now than later. Also, I didn’t get the swap partition to work, so I’m going to try using Swap Cop.

See you on the other side. Again.

Upgrading, Part 2

I’m composing this entry on Panther. So far, I’ve (mostly) got the partitioning worked out (more on that in a later post), Mail is restored (threaded view looks great!), and Firebird 0.7.1 is installed (with bookmarks). It’s quite late, so I think I’m going to call it a night. Oh, and Expose rocks.

Upgrading, Part 1

Despite my previous plans, I found myself in CompUSA tonight, and ended up with my own shiny new copy of Panther. If I ever get it installed, I’ll post a few comments.

So far, this isn’t the cake walk I expected. The problem isn’t Panther, it’s backups. I thought this would be a good time to start fresh, so I planned to format and install from scratch. This, of course, requires backups. I’m pretty sure the only thing I need to backup is my home directory. My original plan was to pick up a firewire cable, boot my Powerbook into firewire harddrive mode, attach it to my PC, and copy my Home dir. While at CompUSA, however, I decided I could just burn a CD to make my backups, so I didn’t get the firewire cable.

Oops. Seems my home dir was over 6 gigs. That’s alot of CDs. So I thought I’d try Disk Copy, make an image, and copy it over my network. But still alot of data. I decided to omit my Download directory. This is where things started to get unpleasant. You can drag-drop a folder onto Disk Copy to create an image from that folder, but you can drop multiple files. This means if you want to make an image of everyhing in a folder except a certain folder(s), you must either move the folder you wish to omit before drag-droping, or create the whole image and then remove the offending folder. I tried to create a blank image to drop my files into, but it didn’t work. (I later noticed you have to specify an image size, default is only 10meg.)

I eventually gave up on Disk Copy. I tried connecting to my Windows PC, and directly copying my home folder. After churning for a few, it told me it would take 3 hours. That increased to 6. I aborted. Later, I found that this was ludicrous… it was initially copying a bunch of small files, which gives poor performance, and extrapolating.

In the end (a couple hours after I started), I ended up getting everything copied, I think (hope!); I copied the bigger files, like music and downloads, directly, and made a disk image for everything else (what a pain). Once this was all done, I took out some extra insurance by exporting settings from a few imporant programs (Firebird bookmarks, NetNewsWire subscriptions, etc), and making an additional disk image of my /Users/jclark/Library/Mail.

Just to make this even more fun (for some definition of fun), I’ve decided to partition my drive fairly aggressively (OS, Applications, Users, swap). I’m authoring this entry from my Win2K PC while Panther merrily installs. More to come.

To Panther…

…Or not to Panther? That is the question, at least for me. While it seems that many other bloggers already have the new cat by the tail, I’m undecided. Of course, like any good geek, I want the newest toys. But is it really USD 129.00 worth of new toys?

Mark Pilgrim has published a rather detailed overview of Panther. Reading through the article, I don’t see much I would need on a daily (or even monthly) basis. Not to poo-poo these features, they just don’t really apply to me.

For example, the new Activity Monitor and System Profiler look like tools I’d rarely (if ever) use. The new Disk Utility seems nice, but I doubt I’d need it. The new printing features should have been in a prior OS X release; but I’ve had my Powerbook successfully printing to a shared Samba printer for nearly a year. The multi-user and security features look nice, but I’m the only user of my machine, and I’m really not concerned about my encrypting my files.

There are some new Panther features which do pique my interest, however. The improvements to Finder are much needed. Expose looks like something invented for me… I always have dozens of windows open at once. And a feature Mark didn’t mention, but which Apple has been touting, is threaded-discussion-view in Mail.app (perfect for mailing lists).

I have yet to write a native OS X application, or to even look very hard at Objective C. Nevertheless, this MacDevCenter.com article about the new XCode IDE (ships with, and only available for, Panther) has got me to thinking.

All in all, I think OS X 10.3, “Panther”, will make a fine addition. To my Christmas list.

OS X Trivia

While installing Syncato via Syncatomatic on my Powerbook, I was idly watching make messages scroll by when I something caught my eye. I’ve always enjoyed watching makefiles talk to themselves, e.g. ‘Checking for xyz… found’. Today I saw ‘checking the maximum length of command line arguments…’

The maximum length of a command line argument under tcsh on OS X 10.2.6 is 16384 characters. Now you know.