newbie struggles with e.g. gcc4.2

[andy]

Well I'm getting nowhere.
Running MacOS X 10.5.3.

Installed macports - the universal one for leopard.
It seemed to hang on the post-install script.  Later
installs don't but in any case I get no .profile created
as the doc says.  No matter, I can fill in the values
and get them on the path for usage.  But then two pieces
of software I want to use on the mac that I use a lot
are tkdiff and pdftk, neither of which I have succeeded
in getting going.

pdftk builds ok but gives me run time errors that I think are
related to the X server not doing things it wants it to
(DISPLAY is ok - I mean operations it won't do).  Sigh.

pdftk I can't build - it depends on gcc4.2 and installation
of that hangs while building (or is unbelievably slow
in compiling).  This does not surprise me as I often had
to do little fiddle to build gcc on linux systems in the past.

Still sighing - I thought it was going to be easy - maybe
I should try fink or run a linux under parallels.

one thing I do notice is that many processes have the word darwin
in the paths of things they are executing - maybe the failure to
get the post-install script working has created some configuration
problems - so far my attempts to even find out what that script
is called so I can debug it have failed.  Damn, this is hard,
and I'm not a unix-newbie!

fred.