Let me say it. The X.org 7.2 packaged with Leopard is simply half-baked. There are a number of obvious shortcomings in this release and unfortunately, Apple has declined to make amends. Fortunately, there is the XQuartz project which provides updated X11.app binaries which are a direct replacement. This upgrade is a must if you are planning to use X11 apps in Fink. There are still no native ports of wireshark, pan, and other great open source apps found under Linux. Fink is a quick and elegant way to get these on your system, though it is not without it's own difficulties.

I used to require an updated X11.app to use with OpenOffice, but as there is a native aqua version as of version 3.0, there is no longer a need for this. I wonder how much longer it will take before there are native packages that can be built and deployed in the native OS X environment?

As or writing this, Fink is at version 0.9.0. This package manager is by far the simplest way to get open source apps working under OS X. When I reinstalled this on my system, I was perplexed by the incompleteness of the packages displayed. I finally clued in and realized that the update method was set to point. This only allows packages added to the 10.5 tree to be accessible. To change this, Fink needs to be reconfigured using the following command:

# fink configure

The trick is to change the self update method to rsync or cvs. This will ensure that all supported packages from 10.4 to 10.5 will be available to Fink.

Just a word of warning: if you decide to update/install an application which requires gcc 4.3.2 as a dependency, prepare for a long install.

One of the things that seemed to require herculean effort the first time around was the installation of an OpenVPN client on OS X. When I first attempted to use TunnelBlick, it did not seem to support automatic installation of the kernel extensions required to create the tap virtual network interfaces. Thankfully, as an official project under the auspices of Google, this is no longer the case. Installation was pretty straight-forward and all that was required was to drop in my existing configuration files into the User/Library/openvpn directory.

One caveat is to ensure that the contents of the configuration files use file and path names that are relative to their location within that directory. TunnelBlick will fail otherwise.