Thanks to Adrian's help, I was able to complete the install of MacPorts. My goal in installing MacPorts was to get a ntop installed. Checking for installation instructions for ntop on macports.org wasn't helpful at all; I couldn't find any instructions. Luckily, back at the old darwinports.org there is a url for ntop, http://ntop/darwinports.org that actually contains installation instructions: cd /opt/local/bin/portslocation/dports/ntop % sudo port install ntop One problem here is that if /portslocation/dports/ntop doesn't exist, then you must create it, cd to it and then sudo. Even thou the instructions are clear, they should mention this to save newbies like me. Once the directories are created, sudo port install ntop works wonderfully, installing all sorts files - that is until it gets to libcap. Libcap can't be found in any of the following locations: ---> Fetching libpcap ---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://www.tcpdump.org/release/ ---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/distfiles/libpcap ---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/distfiles/general/ ---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/libpcap ---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/distfiles/libpcap ---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/distfiles/general/ ---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/libpcap Error: Target org.macports.fetch returned: fetch failed Since I it appears that libcap is required to build and install ntop, what should I do from here? Thanks in advance, - Alex Zavatone On Mar 11, 2008, at 3:06 PM, Adrian Nier wrote:
On Mar 11, 2008, at 7:56 PM, Alex Zavatone wrote:
The better solution is to create a file called '.profile' in your home directory. In this file you specify additional directories that are to be scanned for executables and manual entries. The MacPorts installation fails to create this file, so you have to create it manually.
Awesome. Works like a charm on my other mac. Why doesn't the .DMG installer do this?
No "non compiler friendly" user is going to be able to get up and running without this information.
What has been written to the .profile file has little to do with compilation. This is a facility of the shell to make it easier for users to run commands. Instead of typing the full path you can type just the name of the executable you wish to run.
If the operating system wouldn't have the same settings for directories like /bin/ or /usr/sbin/ then you would have to type / bin/ls to get a directory listing and /usr/sbin/diskutil to run the command line version of Disk Utility.