Karen Lewellen wrote: > So again, that you are not actively engaged in running Lynx on your mac > with a braille display means that your contribution is not going to help > Andrew.
Karen, You didn't mention braille at all in the original question. You can hardly fault Travis for not having answered most helpfully towards that goal. Now you've also introduced '2011 MacBook Pro', which undoubtedly also means some rather out of date version of Mac OS. In which case the question your friend probably needs answered is, rather, 'What is the newest or best version of Lynx I can get for INSERT NAME OF ANCIENT MAC OS HERE?' Or, furthermore, add: 'which is built in such a manner that it plays nicely with assistive tools like a braille output device'. And THAT question is a deep question because different assistive software will have different capabilities for receiving input. The capability they need to deal with Lynx is simple ASCII input from a shell-oriented program. This is a capability I would naturally expect any Linux assistive software to have; and rather less likely on Windows; and I don't venture to guess about Mac, except that it will be somewhere between the two extremes. ===== The state of open source software on Macs is and always has been utterly disastrous, as far as I can tell. There are a bewildering number of competing 'comprehensive' repositories of ported software: MacPorts, Homebrew, Fink, and probably 2-3 others at lower tiers. It is(*) generally the case that if you go looking for a particular piece of open software for the Mac, it will be available in one or more of those repositories; frequently at different version levels. If you need a particular version, you're likely forced to a particular porting suite. But then if you need something that isn't in that suite (or isn't up to date in that suite, or is built with the such-and-such hooks, or just doesn't quite work right), you probably need another one. And they clash like all get out. I've been told by techie Mac users that the different porting suites *don't* clash; and then I've had any Mac I ever tried that on, catch fire. Figuratively, more or less. All of which means: if Andrew is doing serious complex work on his ancient Mac, it is fairly likely that he already has one of these porting suites. It probably has Lynx in it, so he just has to type 'fink install lynx' or whatever the actual invocation is for that suite. But, even that is quite tenuous because it's pretty likely that the porting suites have by now given up on whatever old Mac OS he's running. The *other* choice is to download the Lynx source, type './configure; make'; and hope for the best. It ought to build, assuming he has the Mac development system 'xcode' installed. On current versions of Mac OS, if you try to run one of the command line development tools like `make`, and Xcode isn't installed, it will guide you through that installation. I don't know about older releases. It is also quite likely that Apple in all their walledgardnitude will no longer *offer* the Xcode for that old OS, and the current one won't install. This mingled forest and swamp of disasters *can* be navigated through. But it will not be as easy as just asking 'what version of Lynx'. >Bela< (*)My own interactions with Macs are sporadic over the years. My info about open source porting environments is mostly out of date. But I doubt things have improved much. Perhaps there is a new, awesome, all-encompassing porting suite -- so now there would be 4 major competitors which you would somehow have to balance on a system in order to get all the pieces you want..... PS: a likely much easier question is: 'where can I get any sort of version of Lynx, old or new, which runs on Mac OS version XYZ?' Various sorts of small independent builds exist. They are probably not much maintained, especially as builds for older OSes, so will be whatever old version was last built compatibly with that OS release -- which should be sufficient *at least* for a proof of concept setup.
