[maceye]

I don't know much about unix (I installed and played with fink a while ago, and I use the terminal if the Finder won;t do what I want it to), and I want to try to use X11. What (major) apps are available for x11? I downloaded gimp and xchat, and I want to get open office (will it work on X11? Which version should I download?). What other cool/useful software packages are there for X11? Sorry if these are stupid questions, but I'm not exactly an expert...

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[clarkgoble]

Actually truth be told, there are very few X11 apps that don't have better equivalents on the OSX native side. The best way to get most of the good applications is to download Fink and follow carefully the discussion of Apple's X11 client at fink.sourceforge.com.

The main "good" applications are AbiWord, OpenOffice, Gnumeric, and KOffice. I've not tried running KDE applications under Apple's X11. I've heard some people have difficulty with it.

The main advantage to X11 is for administration tools and various programming projects that use what is called the TK library. However even those limits are changing.

[ryju]

i just installed X11 because I wanted to try it out, but I have no clue how to actually RUN it. I downloaded and installed xchat and a GUI editing program but I don't even know where they are or how to start them...

sorry for the noobie questions but how can i get this to work?

[justinkim]

Nessus is pretty cool for running security checks.

[clarkgoble]

How did you download the programs? In the Unix world downloading programs is MUCH more complex than in the Windows or Mac world. (Unix folks, especially Linux folks, tend to overlook this)

Make sure that whatever you downloaded wasn't a package (unless you did it with Fink). If you downloaded something outside of Fink and it came as a .tar.gz file or a .tgz file then you have to compile the program. First make sure you have the Apple Developer tools installed. Then open the terminal and cd to the directory you unstuffit from the .tgz file. In it first try "make dependencies" or "make depend" -- not typically necessary, but do it just in case. Then type "make" and it will compile the program. With most programs you then type "sudo make install" which will copy the files to places like /usr/bin.

Some (many) programs don't install in that way and simply leave an executable somewhere in the directory. Read the help files that came with it.

If you avoided all this hassle (and it is a hassle, especially if the program depends upon other programs) and used Fink to install things, everything is MUCH easier. Simply open up an xterm window in X11.app and type "/sw/xtalk" or whatever the program is you installed.

[MacManMikeOSX]

there are lots of cool apps just not for ppc as their are not enough ppc BSD and Linux users out their.

[clarkgoble]

Most Unix apps will work on any version of Unix with minor tweaking. There are very few "x86 Linux only" programs out there. Most of them are tied to specific hardware tweaking. (i.e. controlling some TV digitizer) One major exception is Wine which is a Windows emulator for Linux.

This is the advantage of Unix. Historically there was a lot of different hardware so everyone just distributed source with #defines to handle differences. It was a hassle, but is far less so now. That is because Linux dominates the market and there is far less hardware being sold. Primarily now it is x86 Unix (Linux and BSD), Sun (Solaris and to a lesser extent Linux), SGI (primarily Linux now), and PPC (Linux and OSX).

By and large all programs work on all platforms. Some may take a bit of tweaking, but that's it.

[plonkerboy]

I am a newbie in Unix and have found it complicated to set up and run Apple X11. I have been successfull but found these traps. In particular 'Nix heads know the names of the default directories in Unix, and for us GUI dumbies all these directories are invisible (such as /usr and /etc) However this what I did.

I installed Apple X11, using the apple installer, and started it. As far as I am able to tell it uses the quartz window manager and all is OK. There have been many posts on forums about deleting or editing the .xinitrc file, but have not been able to find it.

I installed fink 0.5a and then the latest fink commander (search www.versiontracker.com/macosx)

I used fink commander to install (for example) Abiword.

I searched for abiword in the finder.

I dragged and dropped abiword onto an open terminal window (and noted the 'path' to abiword)

In Apple X11 I went to the Applications menu and customise, then add item, double clicked under the name heading, put in 'a descriptive name' and double clicked the command field and entered the path to abiword as above, clicked done.

Now Abiword is selectable in the applications menu under Apple X11 and should launch.

There are other default applications such as x calc and xclock, use the find technique to find them and add them to the applications menu.
To find out what 'applications' are installed with Apple X11 just type ls (and the enter key) in the xterm window that opens when you launch Apple X11
Good luck