# Question(s) for the Mac User



## tzoi516 (Oct 16, 2013)

Until I can get all the drivers I need on one of my Macs I will have to continue using Mac OS X. With that being said, I'm trying admin that Mac more like my FreeBSD systems. So I have 2 questions:

1. Homebrew or MacPorts?

I'm leaning more towards MacPorts because there seems to be less dependency errors.

2. MariaDB or MySQL or PostgreSQL?

I'm not involved in the database community. That being said, there seems to be a lean towards MariaDB because of Oracle now owning MySQL. Thanks.


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## kpedersen (Oct 16, 2013)

When I tried mac ports a while back, it seemed pretty good. I haven't tried HomeBrew.
You might also want to give NetBSD's pkgsrc a shot (http://www.pkgsrc.org/) Mac OS X is one of its supported platforms. When I tried pkgsrc on AIX 5.1, it worked quite nicely for command line applications but once they started getting more complex (more dependencies) then things started to get a little bit flaky (at least MacPorts and HomeBrew is more guaranteed to work).

Also, FreeBSD on VirtualBox running on Mac OS X is reported to work nicely. You might even want to set up X11 forwarding from the VM to the X11.app provided in Mac OS X.


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## kpa (Oct 16, 2013)

tzoi516 said:
			
		

> Until I can get all the drivers I need on one of my Macs I will have to continue using Mac OS X. With that being said, I'm trying admin that Mac more like my FreeBSD systems. So I have 2 questions:
> 
> 1. Homebrew or MacPorts?



I've been using Homebrew myself for the few pieces of software that I need, namely GNUPG and Vim and couple of others.  Everything has worked mostly out of the box. I had nothing but trouble with MacPorts.


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## tzoi516 (Oct 16, 2013)

kpedersen said:
			
		

> Also, FreeBSD on VirtualBox running on Mac OS X is reported to work nicely. You might even want to set up X11 forwarding from the VM to the X11.app provided in Mac OS X.



I use it in Parallels. Should try VirtualBox - maybe fix the graphical glitch when correct resolution is used. I do like the idea of forwarding to the Mac X11. Thanks.



			
				kpa said:
			
		

> I've been using Homebrew myself for the few pieces of software that I need, namely GNUPG and Vim and couple of others. Everything has worked mostly out of the box. I had nothing but trouble with MacPorts.



How do those differ from GPGTools and Vim from MacUpdate?


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## kpa (Oct 16, 2013)

I haven't used MacUpdate so I can't comment on those. I chose Homebrew because it's all on the command line which is the way I prefer    when installing software.


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## fernandel (Oct 18, 2013)

I am using Homebrew too without problems.


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