gohaku wrote:
Hi all,
I am new to fink and have had some unpredictable installs.
However, I still prefer fink to finding and having to untar each dependency for
some program like Octave which I had some problem installing for some time until now.
I am happy to say I finally have Octave up and running after running the following in order:
% sudo apt-get install octave
% sudo apt-get install pdflib
My questions: I ran the following command: % fink install octave sudo /sw/bin/fink install octave Password: Information about 1122 packages read in 7 seconds. No packages to install.
1. What is the difference between 'fink install' and 'apt-get install'?
This is the difference between the source distribution and the binary distribution. Read about it in the Fink User's Guide http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/users-guide/packages.php
(Don't read the section about dselect, look for FinkCommander instead if you want a GUI for Fink package management).
"fink install" downloads the original source, unpacks it, patches it if necessary, compiles it, makes a binary package (*.deb) and installs this.
"apt-get install" downloads and installs directly the *.deb that someone else has made with "fink install".
2. Since apt-get worked for me, why isn't apt-get referenced more instead of fink?
3. I couldn't run Octave because of a missing pdflib package ( Thank you fink-beginners archive!) but I ran
'sudo apt-get udpate' before I ran 'sudo apt-get install octave', are my packages being updated?
What is updated is the database that apt-get keeps about the packages available in the binary distribution. There are several databases in the Fink system, they are interacting in various ways and it is best to keep them all updated.
Both "apt-get" and "fink" know what packages you have installed, but "apt-get" does not know how to install from source and "fink" does not know how to install from the binary distribution. The third player in this game is "dpkg" which does the actual installing (or removing) of *.deb packages on your system. Both "fink" and "apt-get" use dpkg internally to do some part of their work.
-- Martin
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