site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Cheers _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... As others have explained, you can't just take a Unix release and run it under X11 on Darwin - it has to be compiled for the specific processor architecture. Just to clarify something that apparently is a tad confused here. OS X is not a special case: The situation is that you can't take a Unix BINARY release built on a flavor of Unix on a different platform and run it under X11 on another flavor of Unix in another platform. You can't do that, Darwin or not Darwin or OS X. It is COMMON procedure to ANY Unix flavor to get the source distribution and do a ./configure && make && make install to get the binary for your Unix flavor built on your platform, then you may install/distribute the binary on another same environment without having to recompile/link. Till you do that "you can't just take a Unix release and run it under X11 on <whatever>" because more often than ever they will not be binary compatible. OS X is no different: On Fink and others you find binaries and source as well. It is very common that you have to port source code to a different platform, either by making your code portable or by decorating it with platform specific #ifdef's . But that is also language specific. Take the example of Python: most of the times you do nothing, it just runs on OS X, and the code is the same whether you are going to run it on Linux PC or OS X. For the applications mentioned by the original poster, they are supported under OS X. Finally, as others have suggested, have a look at Fink. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com