If you are really intent on installing X11, here is how:
Like most things on a Mac, installing Apple X11 is easy. One disclaimer however. I strongly recommend installing Apple X11 from your Mac OS X install disks. Apple X11 is also available from the Apple web site BUT it is an older version than is available on the install disks. Stick with the install disk version!
OK, here is how to accomplish the X11 install. Put in the main gray install DVD that came with your Mac and open a Finder window to it. Scroll down until you find the Optional Installs package. Double click on it and when it comes up, agree to everything it asks and tell it the drive to install to (typically this will be your Macintosh HD). It will then give you a selection menu. Click this and expand the applications list. Select just X11 and proceed. This will install just the current version of Apple X11. Done! All your favorite X11 apps should now feel right at home.
One last trick. If you leave your configuration as described above, you will have to manually start X11 before launching an X11 app. You can set up your X11-based applications to automatically launch X11 as part of their startup. To achieve this, simply do a Get Info (CMD+I keystroke) on the X11-based app in question and select X11.app from the Open With list. Now when you double click the application, it will launch X11 and then launch the application.
OK, I know I said the above was the last, but there is yet one more trick worth mentioning. I bet you might like to launch the O
apps directly from the command line (Terminal.app)? To enable that, all you need to do is set the default DISPLAY variable. If you don't have one already, create a .bash_profile file in your home directory. In it, place the following contents (or add this to the contents already there if the file already exists):
export DISPLAY=":0.0"
That's it! You can now start up open office writer just by typing its name in the Terminal command line (if you should want to do such a thing).
When it is all said and done however, I agree with Pulse-8: NeoOffice is a native Mac port of O
, and is just easier to use. I would recommend it over O
.
