[X-Unix] ethereal for MacOSX

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	Hello again Ken. Since you tell me you're not acquainted with cvs (CVS 
= Concurrent Versioning System) or related developer tools, I guess a 
small explanation is in order then..., but please note I'm no expert 
myself! DarwinPorts is, in overall, just a bunch of directories and 
plain text files you download to your computer, of which the main two 
are the base/ dir and dports/. The first one contains the sources for 
the port tools which you have to install to use this package manager, 
that is, the port(1) command, portall(1), portindex(1) and others I 
might be forgetting. The dports/ dir could live either locally or 
consulted via the net at the remote repository, but more often than not 
the former option is what's used. Inside dports/ you have a bunch of 
other dirs (categories) which ultimately contain nothing more but a 
"Portfile" for each ported software title, listing what needs to be 
done (in the TCL scripting language) to get the software installed on 
your computer. So, for instance, if you issue 'port install ethereal', 
the port tool reads the ethereal Portfile and thus figures out how to 
fetch the sources, how to configure and compile them and install the 
binaries. Get it? In short, no binaries or fat source tarballs reside 
on your computer when you install DarwinPorts, currently everything is 
compiled from source... but the sweet part is that port(1) does all 
that for you with just one call!

	Well, the bunch of dirs that make up DarwinPorts has to be fetched 
through the cvs(1) command. As per the instructions layed out at the 
main site, cd into your directory of choice and issue the following 
command sequence:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at anoncvs.opendarwin.org:/Volumes/src/cvs/od 
login

(just hit enter after this line at the password prompt)

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at anoncvs.opendarwin.org:/Volumes/src/cvs/od co 
-P darwinports

	This will create a folder called darwinports/ and download everything 
into it. After that's done just cd into darwinports/base/ and issue the 
next command sequence:

./configure && make
sudo make install
make distclean

	That will give you the standard port tools with which you can start 
installing UNIX software. Currently there are 955 titles available, and 
growing every day! To get an up to date listing of all of them just cd 
into dports/

cd ../dports/
portindex

	When that's done your local software index is ready for queries. You 
can now search for ethereal:

$[juan at PowerBook: Historia](512/0,0)-> port search ethereal
ethereal        net/ethereal    0.10.0a         Graphical network 
analyzer and capture tool

$[juan at PowerBook: Historia](513/0,0)-> port deps ethereal
ethereal has library dependencies on:
         glib2
         gtk2

$[juan at PowerBook: Historia](514/0,0)-> port variants ethereal
no-x11

	That last line tells you what options the particular port offers apart 
from the standard build. So if you want to use tethereal but couldn't 
care less about ethereal you'd issue 'sudo port install ethereal 
+no-x11'. And woot! With that one liner all the needed dependencies and 
sources are downloaded, configured, compiled and installed for you! As 
I said, maybe getting DarwinPorts at first and keeping it up to date 
could become a nuisance for the non command line lovers, but the ease 
of use pays back for everything.

	About keeping the DarwinPorts tree up to date, I'll postpone that for 
when you join the darwinports at opendarwin.org mailing list, I feel 
there's already too much information here :-) Also, you can find the 
main guide at the site and inside darwinports/ there's a README that 
you might want to read, it'll give you a first notion of how things 
work. Of course, appropriate man pages are also in place.

	Well, I hope this has helped clear things out. I strongly encourage 
you to give DarwinPorts a try, it's really worth it! Hope to see you at 
the darwinports@ list...


		Juan


On Feb 2, 2004, at 1:13 PM, Ken Rossman wrote:

> On Monday, February 2, 2004, at 11:39 AM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
>> Hi Ken! Well, it just so happens that Fink's alternative, DarwinPorts,
>> also offers ethereal for Mac OS X.
>
> Thanks, Juan, for first of all mentioning a "fink alternative", which 
> I had
> not previously been aware of.  I will look into DarwinPorts.
>
>> In any case, as far as I can see, ethereal compiles from source 
>> cleanly
>> on Mac OS X, without the need of any patch (I've done this with the 
>> 0.9.14
>> release).
>
> I tried that, but found it was asking for glib (and who knows what 
> other ones
> I haven't yet found out about that are missing).  The more things I 
> have
> to pile on my OSX systems that didn't already come with it, the more 
> nervous
> I get about breaking something else in the future.  Hmmm...
>
>> But if you can't be bothered to do that I'd advise you to surf over to
>> http://darwinports.opendarwin.org and join the project.
>
> The idea case would be "I can't be bothered with compiling source, and 
> would
> rather just run prebuilt binaries", and sometime that's the case.  I'd 
> like
> to be able to go either way, though.
>
>> It might be a bit of a nuisance at first because you have to fetch it
>> over CVS...
>
> Don't even know what this is, sorry... :)
>
>> ...but once everything is in place it pays for itself.  I'm an active
>> DarwinPorts user and "contributor wannabe" and am well satisfied with
>> what it offers.
>
> I, too, think of myself as a "contributor wannabe", though I have done
> little to enhance my status with regard to that title.  I'd love to 
> see a
> lot more X-based apps ported to native Darwin format, as I feel 
> X-Windows
> apps were good for a certain time, but they are outliving their 
> usefulness
> in today's world.  Too topheavy, too ugly, too prone to unnecessary 
> failures.
>
>> With just one command I can have ethereal, nmap, dsniff and around 900
>> other software titles fetched, configured, compiled and installed.
>
> Excellent.  I'll definitely check it out.
>
>> Regarding ethereal specifically, I've been known among DarwinPorts 
>> developers
>> to be quite whimsical about it, hehe! (mainly because I dislike 
>> tcpdump).
>
> (I'm with you there)
>
>> Upon my constant requests a no-X11 build variant was included to the 
>> port
>> (meaning that only tethereal, the command line utility, and not 
>> ethereal,
>> the GUI, gets built).
>
> I would add to that request a request to split out the packet capture
> facility of ethereal (or any other net snooper for that matter) into a
> separate, command-line utility, so one could script packet captures,
> for later analysis by a more GUI-oriented too.  Perhaps this also 
> already
> exists (for OSX and others?)
>
>> The release version was also upped to 0.9.16 and then to 0.10.0a,
>> but unfortunately that last one is severely broken.
>
> Maybe that's part of my problem then.  I tried finking down the very
> latest version of ethereal, which I believe was 0.10.0a.  I should back
> up, I guess, to an earlier version (0.9.something, I guess).
>
> Thanks for all the great info!
>
> KR
>
> Ken Rossman
> rossman at columbia.edu
> G3 iBook/600MHz/640MB/10.2.8
> G4 tower/400MHz/512MB/10.2.8
>