Whatever applications you want to try, you’ll notice immediately that they have their own look-and-feel, and it’s different from OS X’s.DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. But be warned: If you’re not familiar with the command line and Unix file management, don’t bother with either of them. Both are open-source applications that attempt to catalog and help you install dozens of different X11 programs. (ies4osx uses a Mac-specific variant of Wine called Darwine, which is provided as a download on the ies4osx site along with ies4osx itself.)įinally, if you really want to explore the world of X11 software, you can download and install either MacPorts or Fink.

If you want to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on your Intel Mac, you can do so with ies4osx, an X11-based application that uses the Wine Windows emulator to run any of four different versions of Explorer. While GIMP may be the best-known X11 program that will run on the Mac, there are hundreds of others worth checking out: Inkscape is a free vector-drawing program similar to Adobe Illustrator.

Once you download that, you can just open the disk image and copy Gimp.app to your Applications folder. There, you’ll find GIMP 2.4.5 for both OS X 10.5 and 10.4 (Intel and PowerPC). It’s far easier to download the GIMP binary from Wilbur Loves Apple. If you download it from, you’ll get a huge pile of source code that you’ll then have to build into an operable program. It’s a great image editor that’s actually comparable in some ways to Adobe Photoshop. The X11 program that I most highly recommend is GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). To get more interesting ones, you have to download them. The X11 applications in OS X-including xeyes and xcalc, shown here-aren’t exactly scintillating, but you’ll find plenty of others available on the Internet.To be honest, the X11 applications that come with OS X aren’t all that exciting. That will summon the Unix manpage viewer and the text-only documentation for that program. You can then get more information about any of the programs listed there by typing man program name. To get a list of the X11 programs that come with OS X, type ls /usr/X11/bin. Type /usr/X11/bin/xcalc &, and you’ll get an X11-based calculator. For example, type /usr/X11/bin/xeyes & at the X11 command-line prompt, and you’ll open xeyes, a little program that puts a pair of animated eyes on your X11 desktop move your cursor, and the eyes will follow it. The OS X install of X11 comes with a few programs of its own. (Note: If you’re still running Tiger, you won’t find X11 installed by default you’ll have to insert your Mac OS X install discs, run the Optional Installs package, and install it from there.) Here’s a quick look at X11 and a few of the things you can do with it.

But xterm is actually a gateway to something much bigger: the X11 graphical computing environment.įrom X11 (which runs side by side with Mac OS X’s native Aqua environment), you can run a host of graphical Unix programs-applications that haven’t been fully ported to Mac OS X-as well as applications on remote Linux or Unix systems. At first, you might think it’s just another command-line tool like Mac OS X’s Terminal. Go to Leopard’s Applications: Utilities folder and double-click on X11.app. If you’ve ever thought about running Unix programs on your Mac, you might have assumed that meant you were stuck with the command-line interface.

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