Welcome to the MacPorts World

Yesterday I explored the wealth of linux applications on my Macbook. With Fink and Macports two different approaches exist. I decided myself for Macports that uses the BSD port mechanism. Very nice tool with clean installation, de-installation and maintenance mechanisms - simply following the guidelines here. After installation perform a self-update:
port selfupdate

Using Macports is straight-forward, some important commands:
# displays meta-information
port info vim
# install port
port install vim
# list file contents of port
port contents vim
# list all available ports
port list
# list all installed ports
port installed
# Search for a name matches a regular expression
port search vim
# uninstall vim
port uninstall vim
# list other ports that are required to build ports
port deps vim
# Updates the MacPorts system
port selfupdate

Furthermore Macports provides a mechanism to check which port owns a given file (provides), to activate/deactivate ports, to print the location of a given port (location)
During the installation of python packages an Macport error occured, that has been already described here. The CC variable is not properly passed during the port installation. The workaround that worked for me was to set as superuser the CC variable to:

export CC=gcc