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FinkCommander - A GUI Fink package manager Pick of the Week
FinkCommander iconThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
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If you use fink to install and use various UNIX packages (as I do), but find the command line management tools somewhat complicated (as I do; I'm forever forgetting the right syntax for the various tools, and I find the ASCII-based package manager quite confusing), then you need FinkCommander.

FinkCommander wraps the package management system in a nice Cocoa front end, displaying all available packages and their current status in your Fink installation. At a glance, you can see each package's installed version, current binary version, current stable version, current unstable version (if enabled), as well as the package's category and description. A status columns indicates if the version you have installed is current, outdated, or archived, and any column can be used as the sort key just by clicking on its header.

The bottom half of the window is reserved for output messages, exactly as you would see if running the various Fink commands directly in the Terminal. The split position can be resized just by dragging a horizontal divider up and down to give more space to either the list or output areas.

I customized the toolbar to add the install/delete binary package buttons, and now it's a matter of a couple of double-clicks to install (from binary or source) any package that I wish to use. Since installing FinkCommander, I find I'm doing a much better job of keeping current with my various Fink installations.
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FinkCommander - A GUI Fink package manager | 6 comments | Create New Account
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Quite nice
Authored by: Glanz on Feb 03, '03 10:27:03AM

As a user of Synaptic http://distro.conectiva.com.br/projetos/46/ for both RPMs on RPM-based Linux distros and for Debian for the .debs, I was pleasantly surprised to find an equivalent engine for Fink... Even if you prefer the command line method for Fink updates, this is handy for an overview of installations, and the icing on the cake is the package descriptions under the "tools" menu item that informs the user about each package as to installation particularities, warnings, dependencies, possible glitches and development status, as well as a handy URL to the project page of the application in question.



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I can't get it to work
Authored by: porkchop_d_clown on Feb 03, '03 03:08:01PM

Whenever I try to install something it says "self-repair completed. Try your command again."



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I can't get it to work
Authored by: Glanz on Feb 03, '03 03:24:32PM

If you already have version 0.4.2 or later of FinkCommander installed, you will need to drag it to the trash before replacing it with the new version. This is due to the changes in the privileges of some of the internal files described below. For some reason you can delete an .app bundle containing files owned by root but you can't overwrite it!

The first time you run a command in FinkCommander after installing a new version, it will announce that it does not have the necessary permissions and needs to "self-repair." You will then be presented with Mac OS X's security dialog asking for an administrator's password. You will need to enter your password twice and then re-try the command after the self-repair process is complete.

Once the self-repair is complete, you should only need to enter your password once per timeout period.

http://finkcommander.sourceforge.net/pages/README.html#installation



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Anyone else experience this?
Authored by: kenbotwinick on Feb 05, '03 05:51:43PM

What a coincidence. You make this the pick of the week, right when I need help with it. I've posted the following question on the FinkCommander sourceforge site, but haven't gotten an answer yet. Maybe someone here can help.

I'm not sure what changed, but I no longer get the complete list of packages that I can install in FinkCommander. It only lists the packages I have already installed. dselect from the command line does show all the possible packages. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong or how to fix this?



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Anyone else experience this?
Authored by: kenbotwinick on Feb 05, '03 08:20:31PM

Never mind. I fixed it.



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Anyone else experience this?
Authored by: wealthychef on Sep 15, '09 10:17:08PM

care to share how?



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