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You have OS X, so now what are you going to do? (Continued)

Compiling help

By “Remy Martin”, 26 March 2001

Here are a few extra tips on using the OS X developer tools.

The compiler included with the developer tools is cc. Some programs are looking for gcc and will give you an error when running ./configure. You can use cc, you just have to link to it so some of these programs know it exists during the build. To link, type the following as root (su if necessary):
ln -s /usr/bin/cc /usr/bin/gcc

After building, there sometimes will be problems if you don’t install your program in your PATH. The PATH variable sets the order in which the computer looks for programs that you tell it to run. After installation, some programs tell you to add the /path/to/directory to your path before running. The easiest way to do this in OS X is to create a file called .tcshrc (if you are using tcsh) or .bashrc (if you are using bash). To do this (in this example we add the path to X11 binaries after XFree86 installation):

cd home
pico .tcshrc

in the .tcshrc file type the following line
set path=($path /usr/X11R6/bin/)
...if you are using tcsh (default in OS X), or:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin/
export PATH

...if you are using bash.

WindowMaker is the window manager I recommend for using in XAqua. The source is available at http://www.windowmaker.org, along with libProplist, a library required to install Windowmaker.

When installing libProplist, it will ask you to run ./configure. When you do this, the process will stop, saying that it can’t guess the host type. This may also happen when running ./configure for other programs. To fix this, type
./configure powerpc-apple-freebsd

This should allow configure to work as planned.

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