You know what? I do know that my gimp was complied from source, but it was about two months ago, and now that I think about it, it might have been close to an hour or even more, but not 4 hours. Any way, it worked for you and that is good news.
One of the friendly, and far more knowledgeable, macosx guys walked me through all of this. Hopefully one of them will see this post, but let me try to be of assistance. If I say anything that you already know or have done, please don't take offense. Communicating by forums is always more difficult than if we were talking in person, on the phone...
Okay,
Now what? do I go to command line and type gimp? or do I just use the AQUA interface and go into the sw folder - share folder -gimp folder and click on whatever?
That will not work. You can only run gimp from XWindows. Have you been able to run Xwindows? Have you installed XFree86?
Again, please forgive me if I am wrong, but your message seems to suggest you have not yet run XWindows on OS X. In order to do this, you will need XDarwin 1.06, the application that will let OS X run the XWindows server on your machine.
Do you have XDarwin? If not, go to
www.xdarwin.org download "XDarwin1.0.6.1.tgz for Mac OS X 10.1." then follow the install instructions. If you save the file to your desktop, all you need to do is this:
Open a terminal
cd /
sudo gnutar zxvf ~/Desktop/XDarwin1.0.6.1.tgz
XDarwin will look for some version of XFree86 (the XWindows server) which also has to be compiled and installed. Have you done this? I'm really not sure you could complile gimp without having Xfree installed (???), so give this a shot.
Click on your XDarwin application icon (the installer will put this in your application folder). Try rootless or full screen (and don't forget the keyboard command to switch back to OS X from XDarwin full screen). If all is well, you will be presented with a couple of hideous white and green terminal screens. They are ugly, yet beautiful because seeing them means you were successful! IN one of these ugle terminals type gimp and there you are!
If this (XDarwin) doesn't work, here is my best shot at telling you how to install xfree86. You can do this via fink or from source. I am a little out of my league here, but I was successful in using dselect to install xfree. Type:
sudo dselect
then in the "select" screen of dselect, arrow down to the xfree stuff, find xfree86... choose it and see what other packages it needs- then run it. Big area of ignorance for me here - whether to choose rootless or not - rootless lets you run X sort of "with OS X" meaning you will see all your XWindows stuff righ along with your Aqua stuff - full screen actually launches a whole new screen that you can switch back and forth with CMD-Option A. XDarwin lets me chooose either rootless or full screen BUT I just don't remember what I picked when I originally installed Xfree (someone please help us here!).
Any way, those ugly terminal screens are determined by the default window manager called fvwm. If you want a prettier wndow manager (believe me you do), you will need to install one. WindowMaker is a nice one and you can probably use dselect or fink to install that. You might just try "sudo fink install windowmaker" from your OS X terminal and see what happens. You can also try the same thing with blackbox, icewm - one of them has to work, if not all. Type "rehash" after it is done. However, like someone said, fink had some file problems recently, but who knows.
Okay, assuming the install went okay, in order for you to run one of these window managers, you need to have a .xinitrc file in your home directory. Type:
cd ~/
ls -a
and see if there is a file named ".xinitrc"
I'm guessing "sudo fink install windowmaker" doesn't create this for you, so here is mine just in case.
# Window Maker default X session startup script
PATH="$PATH:/sw/bin"
# If you login from xdm, uncomment this to make error messages appear
# in the console window.
#
# tail -f /Users/dean/.xsession-errors > /dev/console &
#exec oroborus
#exec enlightenment
exec wmaker
#exec blackbox
#exec icewm
#exec fvwm
#exec pwm
You can make it in pico or some text editor (even TexEdit I suppose), save it as ".xinitrc" to your home directory:
Any line with a "#" in front of it is commented out - ignored. You don't need any of this in your own .xinitrc file. The line "exec wmaker" is telling my system to run windowmaker. If I edit .xinitrc, and comment out this line with a #, then uncomment "#exec blackbox" to "exec blackbox" (for example), it will run blackbox the next time I run XDarwin - BUT only if I have it installed via fink, source... If you just want to run windowmaker all you need in your .xinitrc file is this:
PATH="$PATH:/sw/bin"
exec wmaker
Or, replace "wmaker" with the name of whatever window manager you want to use/ have installed.
Okay, now go back and launch XDarwin, choose rootless or full screen (maybe either will work for you?) and bam, you will have a much prettier XWindows environment. Learn your way around the window manager - left and right clicks do different things...
Now (finally!), if you want to run gimp you can open a terminal (in your XWindows environment - not the OS X terminal), type gimp, hit enter and there it is. Also, Windowmaker has an application menu that includes gimp (under graphics) and that should work too (it also includes many other applications, but if they are not installed they will not run - kind of a disappointment).
So basically, in semi-knowledgeable and extreme laymans terms, this is how it all works:
XDarwin allows your machine to run XWindows from OS X
XFree86 is the XWidows server - meaning it allows for a GUI to exist on Unix
The window manger determines how that GUI will look and feel
Once again, please don't flame me if you know all or even 1/10th of this - I just wasn't sure, so I wrote everything I could think of to help. The XFree install would be the most difficult thing here - once that is taken care of you are home free. I'm guessing it is already there because I'm guessing gimp needed it to compile and maybe that is why it took so long? Good luck!
