x3270 installation
on Mac OS X

x3270 is an IBM 3270 terminal emulator for the X Window system.

Prereqs:

Before you can compile and install X applications on your Mac, you need to install these items either during the operating system installation or after the fact:

Xcode - Apple's Xcode from the Developer CD that comes with Mac OS X or download from Apple. This installs the compiler needed for the x3270 install.
X11 - Apple's X Window system. Read up on Configuring and Running X Applications on Mac OS X.

It's been my experience that if you buy a Macintosh, that you will have to install these seperately but when you upgrade your operating system that you can tell it to install it.

x3270 install steps

This install was performed on:

Mac OS X 10.4.8
1.6 GHz PowerPC G5
3 gb memory

Your mileage may vary...

I'm not a Unix guy and here's what I did while stumbling through the x3270 install:

Download the latest tgz file from the x3270 download page and put in your ~/Downloads directory (or wherever you want). Currently (2007-02-01) this file name is x3270-3.3.4p8.tgz but you may get a newer one.

Get into the Macintosh Terminal application and enter these commands:

Change to your download directory:
cd ~/Downloads
Uncompress the zipped TAR file:
tar -xvzf x3270-3.3.4p8.tgz
You will now have a directory called x3270-3.3 in that ~/Downloads/ directory, so change to it:
cd x3270-3.3
Start following the instructions from the x3270 build page:
./configure
This may not happen to you
On my system it got this error message (maybe because X11 isn't installed correctly):

configure: error: 'Cannot find xmkmf'

I was able to fix this for my current session by issuing this command:
PATH=/usr/X11R6/bin:${PATH}; export PATH
I think if X11 is installed right, you won't get this xmkmf error. I do the Configure again:
./configure
This time the configure ended with no errors
Continuing with the commands from the x3270 page:
make depend
I got a bunch of errors which I ignored! I hope I don't need dependancies whatever that is...

Enter the next command:
make
make ended with no errors...

Click on the X11 icon in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder. That will start an xterm window. Enter the following commands in xterm:

Change to the download directory:
cd ~/Downloads/x3270-3.3
Initial test of x3270 to ensure it got built correctly:
./dryrun hostname
I checked out various parts of x3270 and it looks good and now I exit x3270.

Switch back to the Terminal window where I enter these commands:

make install
I got this error: install: /usr/X11R6/bin/x3270: Permission denied

So I install using root:
sudo make install
I get prompted for my Mac password and it now looks to have installed correctly.

Go back to the xterm window to complete the install of x3270:

Ensure that I will find x3270 from the regular Unix search path:
cd /
Then enter this command to fix the fonts (only needed this one time):
xset fp rehash
Now x3270 is ready for use, invoke x3270:
x3270 hostname | IP address 

Success: x3270 is working as expected!

I probably won't be able to help you if you run into problems here. Hey I'm a mainframe guy not a Unix guy.

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x3270 installationon Mac OS X

Prereqs:

x3270 install steps

x3270 installation
on Mac OS X