Installing X11 on Mac OSX

Problem:

You'd like to run standard Unix applications through an X11 server on your Mac.

Solution:

There are several ways to install X11 on your mac system. Apple offers a custom implementation based on XFree86-4.4 (with 10.4, the current version of OSX at the time of writing). The XFree86 project also offers an official binary distribution of 4.5.0 (which is slightly newer). Lastly, the latest and greatest implementation of X11 is the X.org X server, which is made available through fink, a unix package-management system for OSX.

HOW-TO:

If you choose to use the official Apple implementation, it can be found on your OSX install media. Installation should be self-explanatory.

If you choose to use the XFree86 implementation, it may be downloaded at http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.5.0/binaries/Darwin-ppc-6.x/. Download all of the files within that directory, and then run Xinstall.sh as root. You may also want to read their documentation for the installer, which may be found at http://www.xfree86.org/4.5.0/Install3.html#3. Note that this version is for PowerPC only. They don't seem to have a universal/Intel version, and so if you have a different platform, you'll need to use one of the other implementations.

In order to use either the binary or source versions via fink, you'll need to first install fink. This is beyond the scope of this document, but a great deal of documentation is available at the project's website (http://www.finkproject.org ). Once this is done, run the following:

# apt-get install xorg xorg-shlibs

Congratulations, you now have the latest implementation of the X11 server installed. You may now run the server via the X11 application in your Applications folder.