Re: [tlug] Advice on buying a Macbook

[Al Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 01:20:56PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> BABA Yoshihiko writes:
> 
>  > Q. How can I use Linux software?
> 
> Yeah, I thought about this one, but I've tried all the answers you
> suggest, and they all were pretty unsatisfactory.
> 
>  > A.
>  > http://finkproject.org/
> 
> DOA for Josh, I think.  All the worst features of Debian/Ubuntu binary
> distros.  I never did get the source packages to work right.  How did I
> spell "relief"?  "rm -rf /sw".

	I'm not sure I agree here as 'it worked for me'.  But
my standards for what I considered 'good enough' are probably
very different from your standards.  When I was using fink it
hit the 'good enough' stage for handling 3rd party UNIX-ey
packages with less fuss than doing it by hand.
	I've managed to slink along a fink installation from 
10.1 through 10.3.  There were warts and some aggravations 
but the fink website did an okay job of documenting their 
problems and offering fixes which in general worked.
	Note, I never used apt-get and only used the fink command
itself.  

[snip]
> 
> Still, I don't think a Gentoo user could stand either of the above.
> 
>  > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/macos/
> 
> Last I looked (June?), it was pretty dead-looking, and had the serious
> misfeature that it assumed that it could take over your system and
> replace Apple's versions of various utilities.
> 
> Until we can get Gentoo to install into (say) /opt/portage, what

	I think I came to a similar conclusion when I looked at it
last year.  If they had something like a PORTAGE_ROOT that could
redirect portage to confine itself into one directory this would
be a good tool but I'm not sure if that is a priority for the
Gentoo folk.

> really looks like the best bet is pkgsrc (from the conservative
> BDevelopersFH at NetBSD, so you know it works :-).

	Don't you need to run the UFS filesystem (case-preserving 
behavior needed for some pieces of pkgsrc) to take advantage of
pkgsrc on OS X?   This is a problem as the UFS filesystem implementation
on OS X is old and crusty and hasn't been maintained nearly as well
as the HFS+ implementation from what I've heard.
	Here are 2 ways I thought up for dealing with running pkgsrc
without having to subscribe your whole HDD to UFS.
1. Save enough space for a free partition that you can use for UFS
2. Create a disk image, format it as UFS, mount it and use that.

	1 works well if you planned things in advance and don't mind
making another partition.  2 is a way to avoid having to rebuild
your system if you forgot to save some partition space however it
I'm not sure how much of an impact on performance running inside a 
disk image will be.

Alain