A few days ago I asked my dad to look into compiling and figuring out how to work with something that uses FUSE, MacPorts, and I guess requires X11 app for what he's doing (he told me he needed it for the task - and I believe him because I don't know).
By the way I'm talking about the X11 app, not the X11 Software Development Kit or SDK.
Well, when my dad upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger he didn't do the custom install to install the X11 app... Apple didn't automatically include it in the regular or basic install.
So yesterday my dad spent several hours re-installing the entire Tiger operating system again just so that he can get the X11 app on his computer...
Well, as it turns out when I upgraded the MacMini's hard drive and installed Tiger again I didn't do a custom install to get the X11 app on my computer.
Now here's the difference in approach to how I went about installing X11...
Instead of straight-away thinking that I had to re-install Mac OS X Tiger all over again using a custom install and checking off the X11 install, I first did a Google search to see if I can just install X11 on its own.
Good thing I did too... because you can install X11 on Tiger if you forgot before! I really didn't want to spend another good part of a day to install Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger again!!
All you have to do is insert the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger install DVD and use the "Optional Installs.mpkg" to install the X11 app by itself...
You have to go through the standard SLA's and destination drive stuff... then you can check off the various optional installs that you want to make... and in that list you can check off X11 and continue with the install to get the X11 app on your computer!
2 comments:
Err, sorry but I had a very hard time understanding this because you use very odd semantics.
At first as I was reading this I became very cross on the grounds that "X11 is not an 'app' its a suite of libraries, architectures and protocols for (etc etc etc)." Finally, I realized you were talking about the "X11 dot app", which is Apple's port of the Xorg (or for older version Xf86) implementation of the X Windowing System.
Sorry, maybe its just me.
On a slightly less pedantic note, and not to be cruel, I am somewhat mystified by the rationale of this post. Pardon me if I fail to understand, but the upshot of this would appear to be "I wonder if I can install X11.app without reinstalling the entire operating system?"
Um... duh? The latest incarnations of the Mac operating-system system library structure are reasonably sensible. To suggest that to install what for all practical intents and purposes is a mere library, and possibly a few trivial binaries, requires system reinstallation would be laughable.
Your solution to this dubious quandary is to search Google. Again, with all gentleness "Duh."
In the interest of concise writing you could equally well have posted "When faced with a problem I search Google."
Perhaps the fact that this appears to have been posted at four in the morning explains all of this away?
John,
Pardon for not being quite so specific as stating quite bluntly "X11.app"... which for all intents and purposes is an APPLICATION!!! (Hence the '.app')
Yeah, sure it might be typically thought of as an obvious thing to install X11.app aside from reinstalling the entire operating system (OS)....
I was showing that it isn't quite obvious how Apple makes it possible to do such a thing...
Because even on a leopard developer install disk the X11.app isn't included by default in the generic install, and if you didn't think to check it off in the custom settings then one might perhaps think that they may have to reinstall the whole OS (just based on where and how it's included and/or packaged).
Based on that, this post was written in part to help anyone else that might not have known how to do this.
Of course it is obvious to search Google to figure something like this out...
The obviousness (or other naturalness) of that action wasn't the point of my writing about it...
In fact what I was writing and pointing out was the difference in approach of someone who grew up in the age of the internet vs someone who hadn't necessarily. (The difference between baby-boomer era and generation X & Y era approach.)
I was also showing through the differences in approach that even what we think might be only possible one particular way can be achieved by other means... as long as we don't let our knowledge get in the way and take the extra minute to look it up!
Finally regarding the time of writing...
You know that I work nights.
Wouldn't it be obvious to someone who makes a bunch of rather obvious comments, and talking down to others, would realize that I would generally stick to that schedule.
As a matter of fact, this post had nothing to do with the time of day... it was written in the middle of the day as it was for me on my schedule.
And again to reiterate:
This post was about the difference in the methods of approach and how one's own knowledge and/or ideas can get in their own way of a simpler solution - which I went so far as to outline in grave detail...
And it is in the detail that John was mislead from the broader picture of what this post was actually about!
Post a Comment