"Melanie L Chang" wrote in message
...
That's right, Melinda -- I'm talking to you!

Maybe I'm a Luddite, but I like tin better than any of the
download-and-read newsreaders. I found a page for something called
"Darwinports" that makes it look as if I must download this "Darwinports"
thingie before I can install tin. Is this something I want to do, or is
it something that could somehow mess up my system?

tin.org has direct downloads if you don't want to mess with Darwinports.

Out of curiosity, do you have to run tin in X11? That's my only gripe about
running Pan (which I like on the Macs). X11 feels clunky.

--
Tara

In article ,
Tee wrote:
Out of curiosity, do you have to run tin in X11? That's my only gripe about
running Pan (which I like on the Macs). X11 feels clunky.

She should be able to run tin in a terminal window - no X
required. One of my few gripes about the Mac, or at least
about my PowerBook, is that X is really annoyingly slow.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Average real weekly wages are lower today than they
were at the end of the 2001 recession.

In article ,
Melanie L Chang wrote:
OK, now I'm confused. I downloaded tin. It seems as if I need
Darwinports and/or Fink to install it. The pages are written for people
who know more about UNIX than I do, so I can barely understand what they
say. OS9 and previous I was fairly good at tinkering around under the
hood (not that you need to much with Macs) but I have to admit that OSX
is a black box to me.

In an effort to make Unix more accessible to non-technical
users and Linux aficionados, most Unixes now have "ports" or
"packages" facilities available that allow the installation
and compilation of software without having to know what's
actually going on. It becomes particularly useful when one
package is dependent on another package (or packages). Two
systems for doing this on MacOS are Darwinports and Fink.
As I said, I would choose one or the other and stick with it
because if they share the same namespace (and I do not know
whether or not they do) you can create messes around the
installation of dependencies.

That said, you really don't need either if you're
comfortable compiling stuff yourself and are able to figure
out if there are dependencies and what they are. Usually
there's a file called INSTALL or README or something along
those lines in top of the source code directory that
describes what you need to do.

X (aka X11, where '11' is the version major number) is the
traditional Unix user interface. MacOS allows you to run it
in addition to the MacOS user interface. I would guess that
if you've never used it in the past you probably shouldn't
worry about it now.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Average real weekly wages are lower today than they
were at the end of the 2001 recession.