DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build. It is terribly technics and
somewhat frustrating. Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.
Despite a lot of reading and cogitating I’m still just flailing about. Why is GTK2 not already there? I wonder if other distributions of X11 will help me.
sudo port install xorg-server
The Dr. Queue instructions suggest that maybe an X11 server would help, and this seems to be a compatible X Window system.
Sadly, no go, still a bomb on compiling GTK2.
Updated tcl to 8.6.1, but no dice. I don’t even know why I did this – some error (or maybe the X-org server?) convinced me that I was at the wrong version of TCL, which is yet another computer language I do not know. It had no effect whatsoever.
Then I realized that there must be some other Open Source programs that are already using compiled dylibs of GTK2. Maybe I could just use one of those. I remembered that my dabbling with Synfig Studio required me to become familiar with X11. Clearly it used X11 and probably GTK2 – so I downloaded it to see if the dylib files could be found in the install.
Finding a dylib in a Mac program is easy. You right-click on the .app file and “Show Contents…” You’ll find all sorts of resources in there, including cursors, JPEG startup screens, and snippets of compiled code, like dylibs. I just copied those out of Synfig Studio, slapped them in the appropriate /opt directory, and tried the drqman compile.
Sadly, the versions in Synfig Studio were not at all right. My drqman needed specific versions of GTK2, and thankfully the compile fail told me which ones those were. I went back to search and found another dylib in a Tiger (OS 10.4) build of GIMP (the Open Source version of Photoshop.) I had a little trouble finding an old enough version of GIMP to provide the proper version of GTK2 (I needed version 12.0.0.0). But I worked it out with version 2.6 of GIMP.
I copied the dylib into the proper folder where it could be expected and once again tried the build for drqman. It started! But now drqman wanted a library called GDK as well! Back to GIMP… the GDK libraries were also there, so I tried again. While I was poking around in GIMP I noticed that libpangcairo and some other dylibs were there. I grabbed ’em all! The ones it did not need it would ignore!
Success!
But then
The compile asked for libXcursor, and that I could not find in that old GIMP install. So I went back to MacPorts. Ports found libXcursor just fine. But while trying to build it ports choked.
Why? Because it needed db48… the same db48 I could not get before and which I was trying to work around.
This is such a dead end!
And not only that, I had gone so far beyond Plan B that I was into some other alphabet. It was actually a testament to my tenacity that I had worked up that many solutions, but they were getting weirder and more Frankensteiny. Who knows what kind of damage I had done to this operating system installing things this way?
At this point I wanted to throw the Mac Mini down the stairs. But then it occurred to me – part of the issue is that my old-ass operating system was having trouble finding old sources to compile. Everyone is so far beyond OS 10.4 now. I was only using it because I thought it would be easier on the Mini. But why? Why not try 10.5? That OS works fine on the Mini, it’s just a bit slower…