Allen Day’s Blog

I’ve been using Fink for my X11 needs for the last ~5 years… the whole time I’ve had a Mac. I was never happy with the shenanigans required to get X11 working with Fink. The procedure is to erase the system-installed X11, replace with Fink X11, twiddle XDarwin (which comes from… where, exactly in the Fink build process?), twiddle some .info files to get fluxbox working, etc, etc.

Today I upgraded my 10.4 box to 10.5 and… yep. My X11 setup broke. So I got to spend today fighting with Fink again. In the end, I discovered that this is now (as opposed to 5 years ago) a dream to do with DarwinPorts. It’s pretty much

1. sudo port install fluxbox
2. configure .xinitrc, and
3. startx

I’m still using fink for some other development related stuff, but I’m planning to look into using more DarwinPorts. Hadn’t realized it had come so far along.

Update: The X11.app / DarwinPorts technique suffers from clipboard problems and is actually more broken than XDarwin.app / Fink in that it will not copy/paste between X11/Aqua in either direction. I managed to get this working though by:

1. In X11.app preferences, check “Enable key equivalents under X11″. All else unchecked.
2. Get the quartz-wm from a Tiger X11User.pkg file. I got mine after cobbling together some information and put it in ~/Documents. Start it up in .xinitrc as “quartz-wm –proxy-only &”. This allows Aqua copy -> X11 paste.

What this achieves:

• Copy/paste in Aqua: As usual with Command-{C,V}.
• Copy/paste in X11: As usual with highlight/middle-click.
• Copy in X11, paste in Aqua: highlight in X11. Command-C in X11 to copy. Command-V in Aqua to paste.
• Copy in Aqua, paste in X11: Command-C in Aqua to copy. Middle-click in X11 to paste.

Aside from going X11 -> Aqua this feels pretty natural. Whew!