Running the Gimp in MacOS X Leopard

Several days ago, I finally could not resist it any longer – I bought an iMac. After having overcome the first shock regarding the obscene price of this device¹⁾, I am really loving to work with MacOS X.

Even more so after I found out that, by using MacPorts, I can install a great part of my beloved Linux applications.

I also installed the Gimp that way (although I found out later that there's a complete package to be found here: http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net). The only problem with the Gimp version from MacPorts was that somehow it required me to start X11 manually before running it – while for all other X11 software, it seems to launch automatically.

After some tinkering, I found the problem to be the start script of the Gimp, provided by MacPorts. I guess it makes some stuff that is no longer necessary in Leopard; especially trying to run “open-x11”, which is not present in Leopard (at least no on my system). But it's fixed easily by editing the file /Applications/MacPorts/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/script and deleting (or commenting out) all lines except the following:

#!/bin/sh
 
CWD="/opt/local"
cd ~/
exec "$CWD/bin/gimp" "$@"

Now it works just fine: X11 is starting right before the Gimp.