Fink Troubles - Cannot perform symlink test
So, I’m trying to start developing synflare.com, using my MacBook and OSX as a development platform.
I need GD for PHP, and I can’t be screwed compiling it from source (that’s why I’ve also moved from Gentoo to Ubuntu. Binaries make life easier). Fink is a brilliant service that provides an almost ‘apt’ way of getting and installing software. With Fink, I can issue a single command in terminal and have GD install itself.
My problem, however, was that Fink wasn’t installing. At the install volume selection screen, I wasn’t able to select my root volume. It’s reasoning was: “You cannot install Fink on this volume. Cannot perform symlink test on this volume because of a permissions problem. Try performing the “Repair Disk Permissions” function in Disk Utility”.
After several Verify and Repair permissions commands, I still had no joy. I noticed that the Disk Utility log was spouting the line: “ACL present but not expected for…”. After some investigation, those lines are merely informational. As Fink still wasn’t installing, I decided to fix them by running ‘chmod -a# 0′ on the directories affected. This still didn’t help! I was at breaking point.
I decided to fix it my way (read: quick and simple).
Entering the Fink Installer Package (right-click, Show Package Contents - in Finder), I could see three scripts in the Resources folder, one of which was VolumeCheck, which basically tells the Installer if you have permissions to the Volume in question. Editing this script, I made sure it did nothing but return an exit-code of ‘0′ back to the installer.
Hey-presto, it works, and there’s no noticable issues with Fink. GD installs perfectly.
In a nutshell:
- Copy the Fink Installer Package out of the DMG and into your home folder.
- Go into the folder where you copied the package, right click on the package and click ‘Show Package Contents”
- Navigate to the Resources directory, which resides inside the Contents directory.
- Delete the existing VolumeCheck script.
- Download this file - volumecheck - and extract it into the Resources directory in the package.
- Run the installer!
If you have this problem, and this fix works for you, be sure to post a comment - I’m interested to see how many people this happens to.
- NM
