Need help installing Fink and creating a .profile file
I am unable to install Fink and I do not know how to proceed from here. The two books I am using to help me learn UNIX are "Learning the bash Shell" and "Unix for Mac OS X Tiger", both from O'Reilly. I installed X11 with no problems, but when I got to the part of the Fink installation where I select a destination, I cannot select the drive. When I select the drive a message displays saying "You cannot install Fink on this volume. The volume does not support symlinks". Is symlinks short for "symbolic link"? The Unix book says to download and install the 0.7.7 Installer package, but Sourceforge only has 0.8.0 for download.
0.8.0 is the newest version, but has something changed since 0.7.7? Do I need to change some settings or install something else? If it makes any difference, I have .bash_history in my Home folder, but not .bash_profile, .bash_logout, and .bashrc. The bash book says if I do not have those three files then my account is using only the default system file /etc/profile but when I looked for /etc/profile I could not find it.
The Unix book says some information will automatically get appended to the .profile file, but will it create the files if they do not exist or do I have to do that manually? Any suggestions on creating them so I do not have to use the default file? I also want to add the X11 information to the .profile file.
0.8.0 is the newest version, but has something changed since 0.7.7? Do I need to change some settings or install something else? If it makes any difference, I have .bash_history in my Home folder, but not .bash_profile, .bash_logout, and .bashrc. The bash book says if I do not have those three files then my account is using only the default system file /etc/profile but when I looked for /etc/profile I could not find it.
The Unix book says some information will automatically get appended to the .profile file, but will it create the files if they do not exist or do I have to do that manually? Any suggestions on creating them so I do not have to use the default file? I also want to add the X11 information to the .profile file.
Comments
when I got to the part of the Fink installation where I select a destination, I cannot select the drive. When I select the drive a message displays saying "You cannot install Fink on this volume. The volume does not support symlinks". Is symlinks short for "symbolic link"?
Yeah, symlink is short for Symbolic Link. I don't know why you're getting that error message. How did you format your hard drive? Is it just normal HFS+?
The bash book says if I do not have those three files then my account is using only the default system file /etc/profile but when I looked for /etc/profile I could not find it.
Are you sure? It should be there. All it does is run the system-wide /etc/bashrc. I've never had a .bashrc or .bash_logout file in my home folder, but I always use my .profile (which is the same as .bash_profile, just shorter to type). It's not there by default, you have to make one if you want to use one. People put all sorts of things in there. I just keep a few aliases and cosmetic stuff. For example, I want to visually differentiate files, folders, executables, etc. by color when I type ls, so I add the following to my .profile:
export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxEGEDABAGACAD
alias ls="ls -G"
I also like to have . (the current directory) in my PATH so I don't always have to type ./<appname> when I run something. I also have a bunch of other directories that have been added to my PATH by various app installers (X11, fink, etc.). My PATH looks like this:
export PATH=.:/usr/X11R6/bin/:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH
This way, bash looks for the app to run by reading your PATH, left to right. The colon delimits where it looks. So, first it looks in . (current directory), then it looks in /usr/X11R6/bin/, then /usr/local/bin, etc until it finds the executable.