Install Slash on Mac OS X

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Posted by pudge on Tuesday August 19, 2003 @06:52AM from the that-is-fantastic-news dept.

bcapps2012 writes "I just saw this on Slashcode.com and thought it would be of interest to many apple.slashdot.org readers. Pudge has gotten Slashcode installed on Mac OS X. As jwachter notes: 'For those of you who haven't been following the issue of how to get slash running on OS X, various Slashcode posters have been asking how to get it done for roughly 2 or 3 years now (essentially since the first preview of OS X was released).' Finally Mac OS X has joined the family."

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One question... by Sheetrock · 2003-08-19 06:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

I thought Mac OS X was BSD-derived and largely compatible with Linux stuff, especially with something like Apache which is pretty vanilla, looking over Slash I doubt it's too horrible about its demands on a Unix-like platform. What caused the problems?

--

Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
1. Re:One question... by bluethundr · 2003-08-19 07:20 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I thought Mac OS X was BSD-derived and largely compatible with Linux stuff, especially with something like Apache which is pretty vanilla, looking over Slash I doubt it's too horrible about its demands on a Unix-like platform. What caused the problems?
  
  OS X is indeed BSD derived and actually includes a copy of Apahce right out of the box. All of the Unix tools one would need (MySQL, PHP) are avaialble for OS X. Not sure what could've caused the problem though.
  
  What's interesting about the copy of Apache that ships with OS X is that it has a nice GUI interface, so those too timid to configure httpd.conf should still be able to cope.
  
  --
  Quod scripsi, scripsi.
2. Re:One question... by notNeilCasey · 2003-08-19 07:28 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  jwachter posts in the comments on the page in question:
  For the past year, a conflict between Apache::Cookie and Apache::Request on OS X has been the last obstacle to getting this done.
  So that was part of the problem ... I guess. -Neil
3. Re:One question... by Johnny+Mnemonic · 2003-08-19 08:07 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Nothing caused the problems. MacSlash has been running on it for years--since 10.0, if not the first beta. Color me unimpressed. Pudge should've known this too.
  
  --
  
  --
  $tar -xvf .sig.tar
4. Re:One question... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-08-19 08:27 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Bullshit. The only moved to Apple hardware recently with the acquisition of the Xserve. Otherwise Netcraft has them running FreeBSD as late as last December (link above), and they note that they only switched to the Xserve sometime since July 1.
  
  Even though they updated it, they're still running an older version of Slashcode, so maybe it's not as relevant to this story since it's not the latest and greatest. I don't know the details of the porting issues to know if this is a factor at all... But unlike you, I checked my facts and admit when I don't know the truth!
5. Re:One question... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-08-19 09:06 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  No, OS X is not compatible with Linux stuff. OS X IS compatible with most GNU and other open source applications based on unix like frameworks.
6. Re:One question... by 47Ronin · 2003-08-19 10:25 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It's not the architecture... The problem is that the directions for SlashCode are so complex that it turns off most people. It's 10 times easier to install GeekLog or MovableType on OSX because the instructions for the install are super-straightforward.
  
  --
  Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
7. Re:One question... by h0tblack · 2003-08-19 13:06 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Just to clarify, you only get the nice GUI's for a variety of servers, system monitoring apps, etc. with Mac OS X Server. The majority of actualy functionality is either there or readily available for Mac OS X client/standard, but you need to play under the hood or use third-party GUI's to configure them. Apache can be turned on simply by clicking the Web-Sharing button in System Prefs, but any custom configuration needs knowledge of Apache and the underpinnings of OS X.
8. Re:One question... by jub · 2003-08-20 16:14 · Score: 1
  
  I talked with an apple rep after a Panther demo a couple of weeks ago, and Panther is going to include a set of Linux APIs.
  
  He didn't have much information about which ones, what it meant for running PPC Linux binaries, etc., but it'll be interesting to see what they're planning for it.
9. Re:One question... by bcapps2012 · 2003-08-21 07:53 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  I'll tell you why it's important to me (and why I contributed Pudge's story in the first place). I am working to set up a Slashdot-site for use by the San Francisco Bay Area watershed and open space community. This will be the discussion side of an on-line GIS system to track environmental restoration and creek protection projects.
  
  In addition, I will be setting up an archive to capture printed/digital publications, volunteer monitoring data, and project photographs. (Kinda like a SunSite, but not quite.) Anyone know anything about HDF/XML?
  
  After becoming a devoted Slashdot reader over the past 3 years since OS X 10.0, I wouldn't think of using anything else to run the site.
  
  I'm looking for a host that would be willing to house the site and help me get it configured, but I need to mirror the functionality from home. I'm brand new to Apache, mySQL, and perl, but am trying to learn fast. Eventually, I would like to see this whole project housed on an XServe co-located someplace else, but to start I want to run this all from my iMac. (Why the hell not, I say? Steve Jobs is no saint, but Apple seems to be doing a damn fine job brdiging the gap between the casual computer user and everything that is the command line.)
  
  Suggestions are welcome here, or via email. Thanks!
  
  PS: I may be straight, but I ain't narrow. Thank you to everyone on these lists that provides valid feedback (instead of recycled off-topic crap.)
10. Re:One question... by tbridge7 · 2003-08-28 05:53 · Score: 1
  
  We migrated to OS X Server a few months back, actually. We bought our Xserve two summers ago, only to be stymied by problems in the Dynamic Libraries. We hired a consultant, who we've in turn hired as our chief engineer, to help us surmount these problems and get it working. We went from Slash .9 to a very recent build in one big leap. Exciting, no? Tom Bridge, Business Mgr, MacSlash
  
  --
  
  - Tom
11. Re:One question... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-01 11:51 · Score: 0
  
  But unlike you, I checked my facts and admit when I don't know the truth!
  
  Yes, we Anonymous Cowards are sooo brave and holier than thou. Don't mess with us. It's unimaginably righteous to assert that we "admit when we don't know the truth" while making it difficult for anyone to substantiate that assertion. Even if such an assertion is true, we are also amazingly humble and contrite when we confess ignorance while cloaking our identity so that no one knows which moron to pummel.
  
  Anonymous Cowards unite! We are, of course, the most intellectually responsible and morally pure users of Slashdot, as everyone knows.
  
  That's why we have so much Kharma.
  
  Not.
  
  You admit you're a coward and a liar. You can prove that you admit when you don't know the truth by admitting you're a freakin' blowhard hypocrite just like the rest of us.
WTG Pudge by HebrewToYou · 2003-08-19 07:00 · Score: 0, Offtopic

I knew you could do it! ;) Keep up the good work.

--
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
How about Win32? by jpop32 · 2003-08-19 07:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

Anyone managed that?

I have an idea for a web site and I'd like to toy with it on my home machine (W2k), and if it turns out ok I'd go public (on Linux, naturally).
1. Re:How about Win32? by HaloZero · 2003-08-19 07:28 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Bit of a rant, I'm sorry, please bare with me.
  
  Development and Production (public) environments, in my experience, are best when kept on the same platform.
  
  Same as you, I found all these wonderful little widgets to play with on Win2K, and decided to set up a Linux (RedHat 6.3 at the time) server to go live with a site. Found out that I lacked the practical experience installing some critical modules and libraries, and the entire project ended up flopping over like a dead cow. It sucked. Really really bad. If you want to know if this project is a really good idea, if it turns out ok, develop it on Linux first, or stick with Win2K if/when you decide to go live with it.
  
  Short of buying or building a dedicated Linux box, I'd strongly suggest just setting up a partition on your drive, or another drive, to futz around with Linux and this new project on. That's all. Nothing too too fancy. Just a dual-boot setup, as standard. It would give you a real sense of the problems you face with this project.
  
  /RANT (Again, my apologies.)
  
  --
  Informatus Technologicus
2. Re:How about Win32? by Methuseus · 2003-08-19 07:55 · Score: 1
  
  That's funny, I had the exact problem. I had all sorts of problems with serving on a Win2K machine but when I put the stuff on a linux server that I set up myself (first linux install, BTW) everything just worked.
  
  --
  Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
3. Re:How about Win32? by Steve+Cowan · 2003-08-19 07:57 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  If you would be developing a site with the intention of going live on Linux, why not just install Linux in a separate partition and only have to go through installation headaches once?
4. Re:How about Win32? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-08-19 10:38 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  Better yet, get one of the virtual machines (blochs, vmware,...) so you can run both at the same time. No rebooting needed!
5. Re:How about Win32? by GlassHeart · 2003-08-19 11:22 · Score: 2, Insightful
  Development and Production (public) environments, in my experience, are best when kept on the same platform.
  Not always. Developing on a different platform may mean:
  
  Increased efficiency due to productivity tools not available on the target platform. This is particularly evident if your target platform is less powerful, and you can afford a much better development computer.
  
  More bugs exposed due to subtle differences between platforms. Many of these are portability issues, but some will turn out to be bonafide bugs in your code.
  
  As you mentioned, there are costs associated with this practice. My point is that the decision is not without benefits.
6. Re:How about Win32? by jpop32 · 2003-08-19 22:14 · Score: 1
  
  develop it on Linux first, or stick with Win2K if/when you decide to go live with it.
  
  When (if) it goes live, I won't be the person administering the machine or taking care of it short of installing and configuring slashcode, and for that I also plan to enlist the help of some Linux wizards. Learning to do everything myself seems like too much overhead just for getting slashcode to run.
  
  I wouldn't even think of hosting the thing on Windows. To each his own (to Windows desktop, to Linux server). :-)
7. Re:How about Win32? by jpop32 · 2003-08-19 22:19 · Score: 1
  
  If you would be developing a site with the intention of going live on Linux, why not just install Linux in a separate partition and only have to go through installation headaches once?
  
  Because I have 0 experience installing and administering Linuxes. And spending a month or so getting to know it just to find out that in the end the whole idea won't fly isn't appealing.
  
  But, I guess I'll have to get my feet wet, sooner of later...
8. Re:How about Win32? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-08-20 01:23 · Score: 0
  
  Wouldn't it be Linucies?
9. Re:How about Win32? by laird · 2003-08-20 02:27 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  While it's a good idea to run the same hardware/OS in staging and production to minimize risks, there are many situations where mixed platforms make sense. For example, when deploying J2EE applications, most of the best IDE's are typically available for NT (let's not start a religious war, please), but you'd never want to run a production environment on NT. One of the nice things about J2EE is that in practice Java server applications really are quite portable between operating systems.
  
  And for non-Java applications, developing on Linux and deploying on Solaris works quite well, too (and saves a ton of money). Of course, you need a Sun to to some staging testing, but that's cheap compared to putting Sun's on every engineer's desktop.
  
  --
  Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
10. Re:How about Win32? by Cloetus · 2003-08-21 08:18 · Score: 1
  
  This is what I love about using Mac OS X -- I have the same environment on my laptop as on my server. Plus no freaking worms/viruses/hacker 3l33t
11. Re:How about Win32? by CoolVibe · 2003-08-23 06:03 · Score: 1
  
  ncreased efficiency due to productivity tools not available on the target platform. This is particularly evident if your target platform is less powerful, and you can afford a much better development computer.
  Huh?.
  Oh, you said "May"... never mind...
Why didn't someone just ask MacSlash? by mike_lynn · 2003-08-19 08:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

They've been running Slashcode on an XServe for quite some time now, they even mention it here.
Somehow I doubt it's taken this long to get Slashcode running on OS X. OS X tends to be semi-trivial to port to for non-hardware or assembly code dependant software.
1. Re:Why didn't someone just ask MacSlash? by HebrewToYou · 2003-08-19 08:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Sometimes it's just rewarding to get things done by yourself. I remember when I was being taught some basic data structures in JAVA -- the professor told us that we can't use the util class because Sun had included these data structures. I didn't understand why we were being told to write code that already works perfectly well until I actually had to do it and fix all the annoying little bugs. I guess I'm trying to say that there are lessons in the process that are worth learning on your own.
  
  --
  I'm not popular enough to be different.
  Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
2. Re:Why didn't someone just ask MacSlash? by dema · 2003-08-20 01:31 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Also, if you read this comment it looks like MacSlash wasn't too excited to help someone else get slash code going on Xserve :\
Great... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-08-19 08:50 · Score: 5, Funny

Now even Macs can suffer the most god-awful uncompliant HTML markup since people stopped using Microsoft Publisher to export web pages.
1. Re:Great... by Namaste · 2003-08-19 10:30 · Score: 1, Funny
  
  What people stopped using MS Publisher to export HTML? When did this happen?
2. Re:Great... by Krach42 · 2003-08-22 04:45 · Score: 1
  
  When MS Word started being able to export HTML.
  
  --
  
  I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Re:My Slash on OS X Installation Notes by Anonymous Coward · 2003-08-19 08:52 · Score: 2, Funny

well, for one thing, we don't recycle our trolls, but use the power of the G5 to come up with fresh ones. You know, like "BSD is dying" and all that.
Re:My Slash on OS X Installation Notes by trompete · 2003-08-19 09:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'm not a Mac addict, but I could easily see myself becoming one. My primary machine is an Athlon 1700 w/512 MB of RAM and a sweet graphics card, your typical gaming machine. However, I do a lot of *nix-centric stuff, such as running PHP, Apache, MySQL, and Samba. These tools will all run on Windows, but nothing beats having a console at your fingertips. I know that windows XP has cmd.exe and cygwin, but they just aren't the same.
OS X has a nice console (terminal), all of my favorite standard unix tools (GCC, ssh, ftp, sftp, grep, etc..), and a GUI that doesn't make me angry. I will never be able to replace my gaming machine with a Mac or a *nix box, but I've seriously considered buying an OS X machine for my *nix activities. Apple really hit a grand slam with OS X, and I hope that we will see some web servers running OS X in the future.

- Loyal PC User

--
More than enough BS
Not as trivial as you would think by hexghost · 2003-08-19 09:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

First, a little background: My company currently hosts cyberlodge.org, basically the first "open source" union. It currently runs on FreeBSD 4.8, and slashcode. We wanted to move it over to an xserve, for political and geek reasons. Suffice to say, its not a simple job getting Slashcode to run on OSX. Many of the perl modules don't build correctly. After about 3 weeks of reading everything on the web, emailing macslash (getting nothing back), chatting with pudge on irc, etc, we finally gave up. Guess i'll have to check it out again.
1. Re:Not as trivial as you would think by pudge · 2003-08-20 02:47 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, let me know how it goes. :)
OS X Server only? by piecewise · 2003-08-19 14:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

will this work only on OS X Server or can it work on OS X "Client"... 10.2.6?

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The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
1. Re:OS X Server only? by Hadlock · 2003-08-19 21:35 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Works just find on 10.2.6 - mostly the difference between Server and Plain vanilla install is the level of technical support, and the fun GUI tools to use everything. Everything's the same for the most part on the back end, Server just introduces GUI features to otherwise console-only functions. That, and Apple gives better technical support to OSX Server customers. I'd repeat myself again but I'm tired.
  
  Although, Server uses a slightly different kernel build, although only slightly, and they're updated slightly behind that of the consumer edition, presumably for stability and testing reasons.
  
  --
  moox. for a new generation.
I don't want to start a holy war here but by coolmacdude · 2003-08-19 17:03 · Score: 3, Funny

what is the deal with you Slash fanatics? You sit at your machines and... Aw forget it, nevermind.

--

-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Re:hey pudge.... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-08-19 17:41 · Score: 0

but at least he submitted the story under a different name.

What do you expect when it's a slow news day and the pudgemaster needs liquor money?
INSTALL NOTE: by hexghost · 2003-08-20 05:52 · Score: 4, Informative

Just something not mentioned in the guide: when you install Bundle::libnet (or Bundle::LWP, one of the two) it installs its own version of /usr/bin/head. You want to backup /usr/bin/head to /usr/bin/head.bak or whatever BEFORE installing those two, then when they're installed, copy your backup back to its original spot. Normally this isn't a problem but osx doesn't treat HEAD and head as different programs like normal.
Bare with you? by MZdoctor · 2003-08-20 10:25 · Score: 1

Bit of a rant, I'm sorry, please bare with me.

Certainly not. How dear you!