I've found nessus easy to compile and get running on most Unix-like
systems, including OpenBSD. However, in the past I had some difficulty
getting it running under Mac OS X. The problem is not with nessus
itself, but with installing the dependency gtk onto OS X, which is not
a part of the regular Apple developer tools. Without gtk, the GUI
client for X won't work.

The popular Fink port of gtk using Fink Commander didn't work for me.
Fink is a little quirky at the best of times, and many of their ports
(especially nessus) are out of date. I prefer BSD-style ports myself.

Fortunately I found an excellent HOWTO page by Mark Dulling
(http://homepage.mac.com/duling/halfdozen/Nessus-Howto.html) that
steps OS X users through installing Nessus properly. He suggests
DarwinPorts to get X and then gtk up and running. DarwinPorts is a
much better solution. Then, one can easily compile Nessus like normal.

(one could also install Nessus via the DarwinPorts tree as well, but
it's a somewhat outdated version)

I didn't see any Mac OS X specific documentation on the nessus
homepage, so I thought I'd send a message to the list. When I posted
here a few months ago, there were others who also had difficulty
getting Nessus up and running on OS X 10.3.x, so perhaps this is
useful.

Maybe a link to Mark's HOWTO could be added to the documentation page?

Cheers,

Kelly Martin
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