Running X11 - 3. Getting and Installing X11

3.1 Apple's Distributions

All of the OS X versions currently supported by Fink use an X11 distribution from Apple. The supported configurations are:

10.5: Fink supports the built-in X11 as well as XQuartz-2.6.3 and earlier.

Note: Apple's X11 on 10.6 has older-versioned libraries than does XQuartz-2.4, so installing such a version of XQuartz complicates upgrades from 10.5 to 10.6.
10.6: Fink only supports the built-in X11. Since our packages are only supposed to build the built-in X11, if you really want to use XQuartz and Fink you will need to make sure to keep the stock X11 installed, too.
10.7: Fink only supports the built-in X11. Since our packages are only supposed to build the built-in X11, if you really want to use XQuartz and Fink you will need to make sure to keep the stock X11 installed, too.
10.8: Fink only supports XQuartz-2.7.2 and later.

To build packages, if you're using the stock X11 on 10.5-10.7, for Xcode <= 4.2.1 you will also need to make sure that the X11 SDK is installed (though this is normally the case by default). XQuartz users on 10.5 should not do this, since XQuartz contains everything. On 10.7, the Command Line Tools for Xcode >= 4.3 contains the X11 SDK. On 10.8, you only need to install XQuartz.

All of the X11 packages support both full-screen and rootless operation, and have OpenGL support.

For more information on using Apple's X11, check out this article at the Apple Developer Connection.

3.2 Using X11 via Fink

Fink keeps track of X11 via a set of virtual packages. The most important of these are:

system-xfree86-shlibs, representing the shared libraries
system-xfree86, representing the executables
x11-shlibs, again representing the shared libraries
x11, again representing the executables.
system-xfree86-dev, representing the headers
x11-dev, again representing the headers

Note: The presence of the separate system-xfree86* and x11* families is a holdover from OS versions prior to 10.5, where Fink had its own X11 packages which also provided the x11 family.

If you are missing any of these packages, then you're missing files from your X11 installation and may need to (re)install something. For example, if x11-dev and system-xfree86-dev are missing, this often indicates that the X11 SDK hasn't been installed.

Next: 4. Starting X11