Increasing the life of your MacOSX with FINK

If you are a linux user, of-course you know what is Advaced Packaging Tool known as what is called apt by linux fans .

Well, as a description it's a tool which developed by a group of Open-Source developers that works with core libraries to handle the installation and removal processes on Debian GNU Linux Distributions and it's variants .

The working process of apt in points of a linux-user is quite simple, grabbing the package from some predefined repositories and downloading it on the system & finally decompression and installation processes take place there .

apt-get in process of installing media-wiki package

As you might use this utility previously you know it will push a great progress in point of speed on your works, installing a package with a simple command : "apt-get install [package-name]", Is it so cute, hum? 

Well, there are many people out there which interested in some kind of apt-get for their MacOSX, but they were found nothing in this case .

It's a good news that such kind of great tool has been developed since 2008 for OSX users !

This tool is called fink. 

Here is the description from developer's site :

Fink is a project that wants to bring the full world of Unix Open SourceDarwin and Mac OS X. As a result, we have two main goals. First, to modify existing Open Source software so that it will compile and run on Mac OS X. (This process is called porting.) Second, to make the results available to casual users as a coherent, comfortable distribution that matches what Linux users are used to. (This process is called packaging.) The project offers precompiled binary packages as well as a fully automated build-from-source system. software to
To achieve these goals, Fink relies on the excellent package management tools produced by the Debian project - dpkg, dselect and apt-get. On top of that, Fink adds its own package manager, named (surprise!) fink. You can view fink as a build engine - it takes package descriptions and produces binary .deb packages from that. In the process, it downloads the original source code from the Internet, patches it as necessary, then goes through the whole process of configuring and building the package. Finally, it wraps the results up in a package archive that is ready to be installed by dpkg.
Since Fink sits on top of Mac OS X, it has a strict policy to avoid interference with the base system. As a result, Fink manages a separate directory tree and provides the infrastructure to make it easy to use.

 You know which kind of progress takes place in OSX world with such tool ?
The installation process is quite simple but it will put itself on your system in somewhat long amount of time (Here is Iran !) .

Depend on the version of MacOSX you're using, whether 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 or even 10.7 there are some recipes here which guide you in the right installation commands you need to issue on your MacOSX .

Would you like to run fink and joy of your MacOSX ? here you can download fink.

If you know other tools on MacOSX with aim of package installation and management, let me know and send your feedback here.

Thank you,

Regards,

- Arash