MacPorts and Porticus

A while back I ran across the MacPorts web site (http://www.macports.org/index.php) and thought it looked interesting but did not have time to check it out.  Recently I had time to install it and give it a quick run through.  

Here is a Macports description of what Macports is: The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system. To that end we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac.

We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute, without splitting them into “stable” Vs. “unstable” branches, targetting mainly the current Mac OS X release (10.6, A.K.A Snow Leopard) and the immediately previous one (10.5, A.K.A. Leopard). There are currently 6467 ports in our tree, distributed among 92 different categories, and more are being added on a regular basis.

I chose to use the the dmg install options for Leopard as it look to be the quickest way to install MacPorts.  You can also build it from the source.  For Macports to work correctly Xcode and X11 must be installed.  It is suggested to have the latest version of both.  Finding Xcode for OS 10.5 for PowerPC took a little work but it is out there on Apples site.  After MacPorts was installed I installed Porticus a Cocoa GUI for the MacPorts package manager.  From the FAQ list I found a link to three GUIs for MacPorts and decided to use Porticus as the front-end.  Porticus can be found here http://porticus.alittledrop.com/.  Using Porticus I installed Frozen Bubble 2 from the list of available ports.  The install took about a hour then to run Frozen Bubble I had to use the Finder to find it.  Frozen Bubble works but the color way off.  I then tried to install a few other ports with varying success.  Some would not install and others install but will not run.  I would be interested to know if these ports would work better on an Intel Mac.  
Macports is an interesting concept but not sure it is something that I would use.  How ever having Frozen Bubble on my Mac is kind of cool.  I will post a short clip of Frozen Bubble later.