Some months ago I had the chance to play a bit around with the Fink project. I first thought it would be an attempt to port Xfree86 and KDE to the Darwin environment, but it's more than that. I inmediately noticed that some of the Debian utilities, such as apt, where ported too.


In short, Fink lets you download either precompiled Darwin-PPC binaries for your iMac, or you can automagically download the source -with all required extra libraries- and compile it yourself. All this with one command : fink install Program. If you own a Mac OSX, you really should give it a try.

And now, the Fink, Gentoo,and DarwinPorts projects announced the formation of a cooperative development alliance forged to facilitate delivery of freely available software to Mac OS X. Under this new alliance, the projects will share information and coordinate efforts for porting software to Apple's Mac OS X and Darwin operating systems. Members of the alliance will share information using the www.metapkg.org Web site, which will provide a home for this cooperative effort. This will be a great boost for Free Software on your Mac.