Thanks Bruce and Jeff, I mostly agree with Bruce's observations and proposal. I guess I don't see the Developer Disk/Fink installation as being way too difficult, especially with proper documentation, but I can see that making it simpler would be better. I should also say that I heard from Paul Fons, who was rushing out of town but said he would try to write up better instructions for using Fink and the source installation of ifeffit, athena, tkatoms, etc than currently exist. The firewall issue with Fink sounds serious. I hope the Fink people are aware of this problem, and can stick to using ports available to those of us living under the government's protection. I don't think we can solve this problem. Anyway, it would be great to have some sort of 'wizard installation' mechanism for all of ifeffit+friends. If a full binary installation can be made and maintained and updated easily, that would be fine with me. I don't know how to make such things on a Mac, and probably wouldn't be able to maintain this myself. Because of the maintenance and update issues, I sort of prefer the approach using Fink (a useful tool for other MacOSX-as-Unix things), either with good instructions or a script that automatically runs it for you to install X, g77, etc. Then Ifeffit+friends could be installed from a script that downloads, configures, compiles, and installs from the source at the Ifeffit web page. That does not seem too difficult to use or maintain. A 'download and compile source' system would make it very easy on users and developers to update to the latest codes. Plus, network-based installer/updater for Mac OS X could probably be made to work for linux as well, and possibly other Unixes. Using apt-get (or any similar system) or just rolling our own (like PGPLOT_install) is OK with me. Either way, it would not be that hard to do. Any other opinions on this? Any volunteers? Thanks, --Matt