I thought Mac OS X comes with libpng pre-installed. It’s pretty clear that I was wrong after I failed to compile a game that uses libpng. The good thing about OS X is that, you can just use fink to easily install Unix/Linux binaries. However, the weird thing is, the game configuration still complains that libpng could not be found.

So I decided to install libpng from the source code. For those out there who may face the same problem, you could try as what I describe below.

  1. Download the library source code from libpng.org.
  2. Untar it: $ tar -xjvf libpng-1.2.8.tar.bz2
  3. Go into the libpng-1.2.8 directory, and copy the makefile.darwin out $ cd libpng-1.2.8 && cp scripts/makefile.darwin makefile
  4. Run make: $ make (It’s gonna take a while)
  5. Install the compiled library into appropriate place: $ make install
  6. Clean up the mess object files: $ make clean

That’s it. The requirement, of which I should have mentioned earlier, to compile libpng is the zlib. I hope you have zlib installed first.