On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, greg hyde wrote:

> Okay, let me get this straight: 

You're trying to install Unix software. in order to do so, you need to
boostrap a reasonably complete Unix enviromnent. Yes, OSX comes with some
of that out of the box, but you're trying to go much further here. 

In order to do any kind of software development (and yes building software
from source counts) then you need the DevTools kit. Yes this is big, but
it's also extremely useful. Not only is it necessary to do all this Unix
stuff, but I've even hear reports of people using it to make Mac-ware! :) 

In order to display X11 software such as Ethereal, then yes you need to
have X11 up and running. Yes this is asking a lot, and yes it would be
nice if you could just run some of it in Aqua instead, but at this point
that's just not the case. You're trying to run software from a non-Aqua
environment, and you need to install the support software to make this
work. This really isn't much different from having to run Classic if you
want to run OS9 software, and is done for similar reasons. 

Is it worth it? Well, that's up to you. If all you're going to use is
Ethereal, then yes you've just taken on a lot of overhead to support one
application. On the other hand, if you're going to be running lots of Unix
and X-Windows applications -- Gnome stuff, Mozilla, Gimp, 1001 utilities
from Linux, etc -- then you now have the framework needed to run all of
that stuff. 

I don't suppose you could have made do with Network Utility.app? Both it
and Ethereal seem to be GUI wrappers around command line tools. If you
don't want to take on all the GUI overhead, then maybe you should start
getting comfortable with 'tcpdump', 'ifconfig', 'netstat', etc. You don't
get the pretty/easy graphics, but you also have much less overhead. 

 


-- 
Chris Devers                                [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Apache / mod_perl / http://homepage.mac.com/chdevers/resume/


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