I come from a linux background mostly, and I finally took the plunge a couple of weeks ago to dive into a new 24" iMac. I have loved it so far, with a great mix of useability and power that I was accustomed to on my regular computers. When I bought the machine I had been hearing for some time about Leopard, and how great it was going to be, so I made sure to place my order as soon as possible after release.

The problem for me is that I enjoy using a wide range of open source applications for my day to day computing tasks. Of course, the biggest ones for me are things like OpenOffice.org and GIMP. I was able to get X11 installed no problem on my machine when it was Tiger, and I could use the apps just fine.

That changed with Leopard. GIMP was crashing on start, and I couldn't figure out why. So I tried following the instructions here to try using the X11 from Tiger instead. The instructions were dead simple and worked like a charm. Soon I was back on X11 from tiger, but I was getting the dirty "double X in finder" as well as the infinite bouncing X when trying to launch GIMP. A quick google turned up more people having exactly the same problem, but no sign of a good answer on how to fix it. So being the linux geek that I am, I turned to some dirty scripting to get the job done.

Unfortunately for me, I knew absolutely _nothing_ about scripting on OSX. So last night starting around 8pm I started scouring through the net looking for examples and tutorials. A few hours later, and I had hacked together this Applescript to fix my problem:

if x11running() is false then
	do shell script "/Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11 &> /dev/null &"
end if


do shell script "open-x11 /Applications/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gimp"

on x11running()
	tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains "X11"
end x11running

Turns out that it worked! Now, I know that it could be very nasty, and I haven't even fully read the references on Applescript, so if anyone wants to suggest any improvements, I am all ears, but in the end it does what I needed quickly, which is to launch GIMP without double X windows, bouncing X windows, or the cache-font error message popping up.

To use it, just cut and paste the above code into a script editor window, compile it, and save it. Should be good to go.