Fink

Fink is an application for OS X that allows you to run many Unix applications on your Mac. At first, I shied away from it because I was chasing the “it just works” aspect of using a Mac. But then I remembered the “it’s just free” aspect of using *nix applications, so I went ahead and installed it. It was suprisingly easy — just matter of double clicking on the .pkg that comes with Fink.

To install packages, you can either use Fink Commander (the gui package manager — similar to Synaptic on Ubuntu) or apt-get and dpkg. If you have any Linux experience at all, you know how easy this is.

And it worked very well. Now I can run Octave — the matrix programming language — and Maxima — the computer algebra system — on my Mac.