A preliminary version of Fink for the Intel architecture is now ready. Fink is a package manager for installing Open Source software on Mac OS X. No binary packages are available, and things are still rough around the edges, but it should be usable if you are patient!

To install, you need to get the file fink-0.24.12.tar.gz from the Sourceforge file release page for Fink, expand the file, and run the command ./bootstrap.sh . At the end of the bootstrap process, run fink selfupdate and you’ll get the currently available packages.

At last check, there were about 1750 packages in the “stable” tree, but about 150 of those did not build. When things are truly stable, another annoucement will be made here.

Note: I still prefer DarwinPorts. It’s more stable and has many more packages available. It also works perfectly on Intel Macs, and since everything gets built from source, anything it installs will be Intel native.