For the last three years now, I’ve been trying to build GNOME on Mac OS X using Fink, but I always end up bailing out long before I get through the myriad of dependencies. Now I realize the easier thing would be just to bail on Fink and go with MacPorts, but I had already taken the trouble to learn Fink’s packaging format. Moreover, while MacPorts has a *BSD heritage (as does Mac OS X itself), Fink has more of a Linux heritage, which I’m far more familiar with.

Fink’s version of GNOME is now six stable releases behind. (Fink has GNOME 2.8. GNOME 2.10, 2.12, 2.14, 2.16, 2.18, and 2.20 have all been released.) So I started mucking around with the package files and got about a quarter of the way through the build order before I realized that the maintainers of the Fink Project had already gotten started with updating to GNOME 2.20.

So it’s back to the beginning, to make sure I’m using FreeType 2.3.5 in all the packages.

Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” has been out for several months now. I’ve upgraded my iBook G4 933 MHz and everything seems relatively solid, so now I’m ready to upgrade my Mac Mini G4 1.2 GHz. This, naturally, entails backing up my hard drive, which is taking forever.