I am not at all a programming sort of person, in fact I have never used command lines. I am in awe of those who can think that way. If I can double-click on something, I'm happy. However, I think my experiences might encourage a few like me to take a try. I would also appreciate the feedback of others more experienced re what I have done wrong and what I need to do next. I am in my mid-fifties. I started out to write this down so if my computer crashed and I had to reinstall the system [not unlikely given my penchant for mucking around with things I don't quite understand :)), I had some hope of at least getting to the same point again.

I have bought recently an eMac 1.25GHz G4, running OS X 10.3.4. I had a bit of time, and wanted to teach myself a bit about Unix.

I started out by wanting to run Linux on my Mac, but gave up after downloading three separate distros of Linux [Yellow Dog, Debian and Mandrake, all for the PPC (Mac) platform]. I couldn't get any of them to work. The closest I got was with Yellow Dog, which appeared to install, but then would get into a loop looking for an x-server or something.

So I turned to XDarwin. This costs money [$34US for the latest 4.4 version in download form, $69 for the printed version], and I would at least get some support thrown in. I have successfully installed XDarwin 4.4 from the terminal after a bit of hunting around for tips on the web, with an instruction

sh Xinstall.sh

in the terminal. This was about the only thing in this process that was easier than i expected. A couple of clicks, and it appeared to run fine. There's a [free] program called fink which installs as a native package on the Mac, and seems to automatically find and compile programs from SourceForge.net to run on the PPC platform. I have used Fink Commander [0.7.0 Fink installation] to install various files including bundles for KDE and Gnome, GIMP. I set as a goal for myself to be running KDE as a desktop. I tried to run KDE on my computer by running the following in XDarwin terminal window [gleaned from online forums]:

source /sw/bin/init.sh /sw/bin/startkde >/tmp/kde.log 2>&1

Rootless:
It started up, but I got a message about sound driver not loading, then I get a screen without the top or bottom menus

Full Screen:
I got a message about X11 taking over my whole screen, which it does, but then XDarwin crashed.

I tried to get Gnome to start by using:

source /sw/bin/init.sh exec /sw/bin/sawfish & exec gnome-session Rootless:
I was told first [after the second instruction] that I "may only run one window manager". Then I was told owner of tmp/ICE-unix [?] should be set to root. Then it ran through a process, which appeared to start up Gnome Window manager, but ended up with icons and no top or bottom menu again. The screen showed a directory, which I could click on and get into nested files, but I couldn't run anything. Full Screen:
As above: got into full screen and crashed. X11
If I started up X11, and used its terminal, with this instruction:

source /sw/bin/init.sh export KDEWM=kwin /sw/bin/startkde >/tmp/kde.log 2>&1

I got a bit closer, in that the sound driver appeared to load, and I had top and bottom menus showing. However, the top menus didn't work, and the bottom menus sort of worked if I jiggled the cursor at the right point. But most of the mouse actions were disabled: I couldn't click menus off or make selection from onscreen menus, the sidebar sliders didn't work etc. later: got it working, not sure how: wmaker may have been part of it, but XDarwin has stopped crashing in fullscreen for reasons I ma not sure of. I am using the following to get to started: XDarwin Fullscreen
[X11] Then I hold down alt/option as I click on the window maker icon which appears, then click launch: The xterm window comes up, and I type in kdesktop
[pause]
kicker

In Desktop>Configure Desktop, I unchecked "enable desktop menus" and "enable icons on desktop". This appears to help the kicker [taskbar] behave properly.

This gives me access to drop-down menus. I have been able to add an icon [path to OpenOffice.org] in the kicker, which launches OpenOffice.

I had previously downloaded XCode and OSX Developer, but apparently not properly installed them. Now I have run [as simple mac packages, easy to install by double clicking] installations of Xcode Cross-Development Tools [which installed gcc, a program that fink kept telling me I didn't have so it wouldn't install packages] and OSX Developer Tools [which appeared to update gcc to version 3.3]. OSX Developer Tools would not install [did I already install it?]. That's helped resolve some issues with "gcc" being absent for Fink to run some installs. So at this point, I had KDE going and could launch programs from pop-up menus or the command "run". I then discovered that I could get Gnome running from an icon, by navigating onscreen to the file "panel", and option-clicking it, dragging it into my kicker [task bar]. Sawfish apparently wasn't running, but I had a new screen with different top and bottom panels, and access to most of the Gnome panels. Sound is not working yet.

I have a number of challenges to go now, including trying to run programs like kplayer and mplayer, koffice, ocrad and a number of others. I didn't use fink to download these, so I don't know how to compile them to run: I have scratched around on the web, and can navigate to where they are, then try to use commands like sh ./configure, but this won't quite complete its cycle. It id, with one program, but when I tried to run the next command "make",I struck problems.

I also found that I could fix some things in gnome by running this line /sw/bin/gnome-hint-properties capplet [return]

and I appear to have made gimp easier to start by running

source /sw/bin/init.sh;gimp

What have I learnt?

(1) It's harder than I thought, because you need to have knowledge of command lines, and there is thing called dependency that I can't quite work out.
(2) Just from trial, error and guesswork, it seems to me that the order I should have done things in is as follows [this could be totally wrong, so I am happy to get advice on this:

• a. Install Apple Developer and XCode
• b. Install XDarwin
• c. Install Fink 0.7
• d. Download packages from Fink, including bundles for KDE and Gnome, gimp, and various libraries.
• e. Get XDarwin going, double-click on the XDarwin icon in Applications and hope you can run fullscreen: if you can, you should get a screen full of lines for a little while, a cursor that looks like an "x", then a nicer mono screen and the xterm window.
• f. Run wmaker?
• g. Configure desktop for KDE - see above
• h. Add icons for OpenOffice.org and Gnome -see above