Fink has been very helpful over the years—I started using it when I bought my first MacBook in 2003—but I always dreaded making the upgrade to Snow Leopard, especially after having shunned the upgrade to Leopard before. It turns out that I've been wrong: starting from scratch, it took a handful of keystrokes and 10 hours of compiling to get everything up and running again.
It all started when I tried to install Term::ReadLine from CPAN, which complained about me having the wrong readline library installed. A fink list readline informed me about a corrupt index, inspiring me to finally perform the upgrade.
Since simply trying to update via fink selfupdate failed with an obvious 10.6 in the error message, and the news item on the Fink project page told me that a direct upgrade from a 10.4 installation is not possible, I quickly took note of my current list of packages, stopped the postfix and mysql server processes and moved /sw out of the way. This meant also—temporarily?—going back to plain xterm, as my favorite konsole was now unreachable. Before this moment I had never noticed just how much faster the painting of a terminal window can be when no fancy anti-aliasing is in effect.
Then, I followed the installation instructions:
tar xvzf fink-0.29.10.tar.gz
cd fink-0.29.10
./bootstrap
. /sw/bin/init.sh
fink selfupdate
fink configure #this is for enabling the unstable branch
fink selfupdate
After this, there was a fully functional installation of Fink in /sw. Trimming my previous package list to the ones I recognized resulted in the following command, which installed some 300 packages:
fink install bash-completion daemonic doxygen findutils \
git gnupg gnuplot gv less lesspipe \
mplayer mysql mysql-client netcat \
postfix root5 svn tightvnc vim wget \
wireshark xfig coreutils
During the process—taking about 10 hours—I had to press Enter three times (for installing users/groups or anacron), but other than that it was smooth sailing. I was casually wondering how gcc44 became selected, but finding this out probably involves some more Perl coding.
All in all, I'd like to send congratulations and a big Thank You to the Fink team!
