Re: Apples / osX

[Kelly Martin <kel () securityfocus com>]

Paul Day wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, McKinley, Jackson wrote:
> > With osX being UNIX "based" and from what I can see some of the more
> > popular stuff should port with a little work.
>
> s/"some"/"just about all". All my favourite Open-source tools will compile
> on Mac OS X no problems. If you want a decent packaging environment, fink
> is based on Debian's dpkg and is great if you want to keep your tools
> up-to-date.

I have to say that fink seemed odd to me for someone coming from the 
Unix world... it works but I found Darwin Ports to be much more useful, 
they're more like the ports collection on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and for 
security tools they are often more up-to-date. Personal preference.

Many people like to get all their security tools from a port, but you 
have to wait for the port to be updated to the latest version, and you 
lose a certain amount of control like configure options.

Most tools are probably better compiled on your own. With Apple's 
developer tools (on the OS X disc) you get GCC 4 and all the libraries, 
plus Apple's optimized X-Windows for unix GUI apps. All you're probably 
missing are some dependencies, which you can get easily using darwin 
ports. Darwin feels like normal BSD to me, with a nice OS X desktop or 
just X when you need it. I like to use darwin ports for something like 
gtk+, and then go compile tools like nessus on your own. Saves time but 
keeps you in control.

Cheers,

kelly