MacPorts/Fink folder icon

ben
Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:07:22 +0000

(click for full-size 512x512px PNG with alpha)

MacPorts and Fink are basically like apt-get on OS X (it installs open-source software on Mac OS X)

The problem with these is their folders (/sw/ and /opt/) gets created, it has the default folder icon OS X. Reasonable, but it doesn't look very pretty. I had a quick look around and couldn't find an icon that fitted with OS X Leopards icon-style, so I made one..

To apply the icon.. well, it's a slightly complicated.. MurphyMac.com has done a decent screencast on how to turn the PNG to an icns file and apply it.

The only thing you need to do in addition is to change the permissions of the sw/opt folder to "Everyone: Read and Write"

Screencast on applying custom icons: http://murphymac.com/slib/creating-icns-icon-files.htm

Oh, I used the Leopard icon template from MurphyMac too, which you can read about here: http://murphymac.com/make-a-custom-leopard-folder/

If you don't have IconComposer (it's part of the developer tools, which you need to have installed to use MacPorts/Fink - so it's a fair assumption you already have it), you can get the folder with the icon applied here (Mount the DMG and Right-click and "Get Info" on "folder"):

FreeBSDIcon.dmg

To be honest, this post is mainly for archival reasons, but thought it could be useful to some people. I have gotten rid of Fink as it was taking up almost 600MB of space, and I only used about 3 tools from it. MySQL/Postgres leave around a lot of libraries/dependancies.. I have now manually compiled the tools and put them in /usr/local/bin/ - I have git, mrtg, bwm-ng, darcs, gpg and wget compiled, and it's only 60MB.

Oh, incase you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, here is a before and after screenshot.