Missing unix tools?

[Ghoser777]

Hi, you may remember me from such posts as "I have no idea" and "I need to get a life instead of spending so much time messing around with OSX." Here's my new question:

I found the nice unix tool, mkisofs, on versiontracker.com, for making iso images. I needed to move all the information from one computer to another, so i thought I'd be set. Unfortunately, I found a little hitch... When I had the .iso file transfered to the new machine, i booted into darwin (I had two partitions, one with only darwin installed and the other with nothing) and thought to myself, "okay, I'll just mount the image!" This sounded like a great idea, until I realized that /sbin/mount would not work for the life of me. On a FreeBSD (the BSD that OSX references), it said I should do some stuff with vconfig, and then everything would be okay. Unfortunatley, when I went to run vconfig, my mac laughed at me. No vconfig in any obviosu place atleast. So my first question is: Where can I download vconfig? My second, more general, question is: How many unix apps were left out of OSX? If I'm going to have to muck around the unix file system, I'd atleast like to be able to do everything I need to do.

Thanks a lot (a place to park a car, what you draw),
F-bacher

 

[mcc]

Pretty much any UNIXish software you could want would be at http://www.freshmeat.com/.

You will have to compile it yourself. Most things will not compile easy; you will probably have to do crazy things, like editing Makefiles by hand, changing all references to "gcc" to "cc" and commenting out any references to "-lm" (whatever that is), appending random fictional -host= values to configure scripts, etc.
(and while i'm rambling: running `ln -s /usr/lib/libcurses.dylib /System/Library/Frameworks/System.framework/System` in Terminal helps a lot..)

The program you mentioned (vconfig) is not on freshmeat. More than likely, it is part of a package of other software (the way that GNU ls is part of "fileutils" and is not available for independent download..).

I'm not sure what to tell you. Perhaps you could find some freebsd users and ask them if they know how to obtain that piece of software independently of everything else.
Keep in mind that mac os x has some radical low level differences from any other type of UNIX, **especially** in its configuration files, so those kinds of apps and apps that are very close to the hardware may not work at all.

There is a osx/UNIX-related discussions board on this very site. You should probably take your mount-related problems there.