Fink about this!
Things are looking up for my iBook now. Over the weekend, I learned how to use Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/) (kids don’t try this at home). It utilizes a combo of Debian (http://www.debian.org)’s apt-get and FreeBSD (http://www.bsd.org/)’s port. Well, kinda, sorta, anyway.Â
I decided to take on the task of installing KDE (http://www.kde.org). Yeah, I know
that sounds crazy, but how daunting could it be? First, I
installed XDarwin (a version of xorg for Macs), kind of by accident (I
could have installed Apple X11). Next, I started installing
KDE (http://www.kde.org). Well, lo and behold, there are no binaries for KDE (http://www.kde.org) on
Darwin! Surely someone has installed KDE (http://www.kde.org) on Darwin before and
uploaded their binaries! I guess not. Fink started
downloading each kde tar.gz source and compiling it.
I left it alone for several hours until it stopped
unsuccessfully. After several times of giving up and even
installing Gnome (http://www.gnome.org), I went back to try KDE (http://www.kde.org) again. I let it go all
day and well into the night building from source.
Finally, I had a working KDE (http://www.kde.org) desktop. In full-screen mode, which
I prefer, it works pretty well. It has no problem with Apple’s
Airport Extreme wireless card, as installing Linux (http://www.linux.org) would have caused.
I had to enable anti-aliasing of fonts (can’t remember how at the moment), and everything was looking crisp.
What’s really cool is that, even in fullscreen, you can switch back and
forth between the KDE (http://www.kde.org) desktop and the Mac OS X desktop. I had to
change the key combo to get it to work (ctrl-option-F11).
There are, of course, some things that don’t work. I can’t get
Kmail to work, but I don’t really need it anyway. There is no
flash player for darwin, but I hate flash anyway. Then there are
just some packages that Fink doesn’t include, for whatever
reason. The whole kdemultimedia package is missing (K3B, Kaffeine,
etc.)Â I can use Mplayer as a video player, but there is no plugin
package for it either. One day I might try downloading the
sources and compiling them, but it’s not really crucial.
I am currently typing this in Firefox (http://www.spreadfirefox.com), on my KDE (http://www.kde.org) desktop, on Mac OS X,
on an iBook. How’s that for odd? Who’da thunk it?
