Installing Free Software on a Macintosh

Apple's Macintosh operating system (OSX) is based on Linux (FreeBSD to be precise). Out of the box, however, macs lack some of the basic tools to compile software and a proper "package manager" (like synapic in Debian).

Installing OSX command line tools

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer/

Package Manager

homebrew

http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/

fink

http://www.finkproject.org/

macports

http://www.macports.org/