## Chapter 2
-A tour of Mercurial: the basics
+A tour of git: the basics
### 2.0 Copyright
* Convert from HTML to markdown source syntax
* Eliminate all content except Chapter 2 and Appendix D
* Eliminate line numbers from examples
+ * Modified to describe git instead of mercurial
-### 2.1 Installing Mercurial on your system
+### 2.1 Installing git on your system
-Prebuilt binary packages of Mercurial are available for every popular
-operating system. These make it easy to start using Mercurial on your
+Prebuilt binary packages of git are available for many popular
+operating systems. These make it easy to start using git on your
computer immediately.
#### 2.1.1 Linux
Because each Linux distribution has its own packaging tools, policies,
and rate of development, it’s difficult to give a comprehensive set of
-instructions on how to install Mercurial binaries. The version of
-Mercurial that you will end up with can vary depending on how active
+instructions on how to install git binaries. The version of
+git that you will end up with can vary depending on how active
the person is who maintains the package for your distribution.
-To keep things simple, I will focus on installing Mercurial from the
+To keep things simple, I will focus on installing git from the
command line under the most popular Linux distributions. Most of these
distributions provide graphical package managers that will let you
-install Mercurial with a single click; the package name to look for is
-mercurial.
+install git with a single click. The package name to look for is
+often git, but is sometimes git-core, (due to an unfortunate name
+with git, meaning GNU Interactive Tools).
* Debian
- apt-get install mercurial
+ apt-get install git-core
* Fedora Core
- yum install mercurial
+ yum install git
* Gentoo
- emerge mercurial
+ emerge git
* OpenSUSE
- yum install mercurial
+ yum install git
- * Ubuntu Ubuntu’s Mercurial package is based on Debian’s. To install
-it, run the following command.
+ * Ubuntu
- apt-get install mercurial
+ apt-get install git
-The Ubuntu package for Mercurial tends to lag behind the Debian
-version by a considerable time margin (at the time of writing, seven
-months), which in some cases will mean that on Ubuntu, you may run
-into problems that have since been fixed in the Debian package.
+#### 2.1.2 Mac OS X
-#### 2.1.2 Solaris
+A git-core package is available through
+[macports](http://macports.org). Once macports is enabled, the command
+to install git is:
-XXX.
+ port install git-core
-#### 2.1.3 Mac OS X
+#### 2.1.3 Windows
-Lee Cantey publishes an installer of Mercurial for Mac OS X at
-[http://mercurial.berkwood.com][6]. This package works on both
-Intel- and Power-based Macs. Before you can use it, you must install a
-compatible version of Universal MacPython [[BI][7]]. This is easy to
-do; simply follow the instructions on Lee’s site.
-
-#### 2.1.4 Windows
-
-Lee Cantey also publishes an installer of Mercurial for Windows at
-[http://mercurial.berkwood.com][6]. This package has no external
-dependencies; it “just works”.
-
-Note: The Windows version of Mercurial does not automatically convert
-line endings between Windows and Unix styles. If you want to share
-work with Unix users, you must do a little additional configuration
-work. XXX Flesh this out.
+Git has long been available as part of cygwin, and works reasonably
+well in that environment. Some people find cygwin a particularly
+inelegant approach to running git and would prefer a "native"
+solution. To this end, the [msysgit
+project](http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/) is rapidly putting
+together a solution including various packages with full
+installers. These include GitMe, a package to install the entire
+development environment necessary to work on improving the msysgit
+port of git, and WinGit, a package for installing just git itself
+without the development environment, (still in Alpha as of September
+2008).
### 2.2 Getting started