Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	apple, fwbuilder, mac

Installing Firewall Builder on MacOS X 10.3 (Panther)
If you are trying to install Firewall Builder on MacOS X 10.3 please read further for some hints. This is just informal note, if you have any problems you should consult documentation on the official site.

First of all you need fresh version of Fink. Just download and install binary package (it requires X-Code tools installed). MacOS X 10.3 support in Fink is fairly fresh and you need to install some updates. To do this use: 'fink selfupdate-rsync' followed by 'fink update-all'. Now 'fink --version' should show something like:

/Users/lord/tmp> fink --version
Package manager version: 0.17.4
Distribution version: 0.6.2.cvs

If you are proficient with Fink, you can just grab info files from official Firewall Builder download site and install them. If you are not, easiest way would be to download and run this user friendly installations script. It will likely install lot of pre-requisite packages and installation could take from minutes to hours, depending on your internet connection and how fast is your CPU. Sometime during the process you may see the following error message:

Downloading the file "fwbuilder-1.1.2.tar.gz" failed.

(1)      Give up
(2)      Retry the same mirror
(3)      Retry another mirror
(4)      Retry using next mirror set "sourceforge"

How do you want to proceed? [1]

You need to select option #4. (You may or may not see this message, depending on how you have set up mirrors during your fink configuration).

If all goes well - you are done. You can just type 'fwbuilder' (do not forget to start X11 first and set DISPLAY environment variable) and enjoy. There is simple application wrapper, which you can drop into your "/Appplications" directory and use to start Firewall Builder.

UPDATE: You must have X11 installed (comes as part of Panther distribution). Also when installing X-Code Tools, make sure that X11 development option is checked in.