Midnight Commander Installation Manual for MacOS X

Preface

Midnight Commander is a powerful and capable file manager very popular among Linux and FreeBSD users..

In this archive you will find Midnight Commander deb package with support for both console and GUI mode for MacOS X 10.1 which (unlike a lot of other UNIX inherited software):

  1. Do not install anything into MacOS X system directories;
  2. Do not alter any system file(s),
  3. Is very easy to remove.

Everything will be installed into "/sw" directory on the root level of your startup volume. However, installing Midnight Commander will invoke automatic installation of XFree86 base package, which is placed inside hidden MacOS X system directory "/usr/X11R6".

Credit

All described here would not possible without great work of talented programmers - Christoph Pfisterer, Max Horn and all others, who developed port of the package management system from Debian/GNU Linux (one of the most powerful and advanced this days) for MacOS X. This port is called Fink. Additionally, Christoph Pfisterer made patches necessary to get Midnight Commander to work in console mode on MacOS X.

Installing Fink

Before installing this Midnight Commander package, you need to install Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net). Since Fink is a quickly evolving software, and you may use different version from main, installation procedure might be different, too, so please refer to Fink manuals.

Fink Tutorial for Beginners

Fink tutorial for beginners is available here ("Safe and Happy UNIX Hacking with MacOS X").
http://homepage.mac.com/macgurutemple/safe_macosx_unix_hacking.html

Installing Midnight Commander

Fink 0.31 is supplied with precompiled Midnight Commander with console mode removed (thus, it requires working XFree86 windowing system). However, Midnight Commander from unstable tree works in console mode (with few artifacts). In this archive you will find experimental version of mc which supports console mode on MacOS X, so you do not have to build it yourself. XFree86 base will be installed in order to satisfy package dependencies, but will not be actually used.

  1. Install Fink.
  2. Install packages required for Midnight Commander - "sudo apt-get install audiofile daemonic dlcompat esound ghostscript ghostscript-fonts glib gnome-libs gtk+ imlib libjpeg libpng libtiff libungif libxml2 netpbm orbit passwd readline slang xfree86-base zlib" (you can copy this line from this document and paste in terminal to avoid retyping). Please note that automatic downloading a number of packages from Fink Web site will take some time.
  3. Place downloaded deb package(s) from this archive in your home directory and run in terminal "sudo dpkg --install mc_x.xx.xx-x_darwin-powerpc.deb" (replace "x" with actual version number).

Known Bugs and Limitations

Midnight Commander for MacOS X is still experimental piece of software, so some thing just do not work as expected. For example, instead of Function (F1 - F10) keys you may have to use Escape + Number (e.g. Esc + 1 instead of F1).

Running Midnight Commander

Run "mc" or "sudo mc" in terminal.

More Info

More info about Midnight Commander on MacOS X is available here.
http://homepage.mac.com/macgurutemple/installing_mc_on_macosx.html

With best regards --- Andrei Verovski --- http://homepage.mac.com/MacGuruHQ