Techline 4 Teens

So you come across some open source software, and it says something like “Mac binaries are not available right now, there might be some binaries available at…” And of course the binaries (term for mac applications commonly used in the term “Universal Binary” meaning an application that runs on PPC and Intel Macs) are like 2 years old. No No, that wont do will it, we cant have old software. Well, you’re in luck, it is OPEN-SOURCE, that means that you can build it from the source.

Materials Needed:
XCode (for a leopard compatible version see this post)
The Source for the Software (for this example I’ll use mencoder
Terminal (found /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

Steps:
1) Find the source archive (mine is named mplayer-export-snapshot-1.tar.bz2) and extract it to a folder (just double click on it)
2) Open Terminal
3) Find the folder with the source in Finder (mine is called mplayer-export-2009-10-16) click once on the folder and hit CMD+C (or apple-c if you are running PPC)
4) Now go into the terminal and type “cd” (without quotes) then hit SPACE, then CMD+V, (when I hit CMD+V I had “cd cd /Users/Admin/Downloads/mplayer-export-2009-10-16″)
5) type in “./configure” (without quotes) you’ll get some output which you can probably ignore.
6) now type “make” (without quotes), this will take a very long time, you should probably go somewhere else while you wait.)
7) finally type “sudo make install” it will ask you for a password, type it in (the letters won’t appear as you type them). It will install the package, and you’ll be done!

Note: If you chose to try compiling mencoder, then you can test it by typing “mencoder” into the terminal, if it worked, you’ll get something like “MEncoder SVN-r29770-snapshot-4.0.1 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
No file given

Exiting… (error parsing command line)” but with a different version, (unless you downloaded it today)