Happy Thanksgiving to those in the U.S. My gift to everyone, a TABLES 3.6 installer for Intel Macs (Download Link) which is also listed on the download page.
I have also completed some work on my new script-based system to help speed the process of creating and updating these installers. An STSDAS installer and a PPC version of TABLES should be up soon … the bottleneck with STSDAS is the sheer time to download and then to upload the installers.
Any problems with this installer, please note in the comments.
.
Posting over at the IRAF.net Forums, Mike Fitzpatrick discusses the release of new Macintel binaries of IRAF and of external packages that fix a bus error. (Note the handy RSS based feed of IRAF.net forum posts in the left sidebar of this site.)
While work continues (slowly) on the final V2.13 release I’ve decided to update the macintel binaries in the download area that includes this bug fix. At the same time I’ve updated the external package directory with a more complete build set of binaries, and especially macintel binaries linked against the bug fix (e.g. even though you can get macintel STSDAS binaries in their latest release, the ones from this site will avoid the bus error problem).
There is no immediate need for every macintel system to update binaries, however if you experience a bus error using the V2.13b2 system I’d suggest you update the binaries before reporting an error. You do not need to update sources, simply reinstall the ib.macx.x86 and nb.macx.x86 distributions, and/or the ‘bin.macintel’ binaries for the package in question.
Of course, the few Intel .pkg installers I have made available use the old potential-bus-error prone binaries. So… I guess sometime I’ll update them to fix this, and subsequent Macintel binary .pkg installers will include the fix as well.
I have a plan to write some sort of script that automagically will create .pkg installers. Or least, partially automate the process. Certainly, some of the creation is rote and could be streamlined. I think there’s even a command line method of using package maker…
.
I added three links to the shelf menu. Three useful sites with a collection of links about astronomy and MacOS X.
There is one by Edd Edmondson, one by Jane Rigby at Steward, and one created by Naomi Ridge who is at CfA.
.
Well, I successfully defended my dissertation on Friday afternoon! Now I just have to get my things packed before I move in about a week.
So, sometime soon, I hope to have a little more time to improve the installers and such on this site.
.
TABLES and STSDAS 3.6 were released today, with binaries built for both PPC MacOS X and “Macintel” systems. You can check them out from the STScI STSDAS download page.
Also released was STSCI Python. I don’t really know what that is but it has to do with Pyraf.
I will endeavor to build .pkg installers for these before the end of the month. Until then, remember how to install them. First, STSDAS requires TABLES. So, install TABLES first.
- Download the TABLES source and expand it into
/iraf/extern/tables/
- Download the appropriate TABLES binaries and expand them into
/iraf/extern/tables/bin.macosx or /iraf/extern/tables/bin.macintel.
- Change the symlink of
bin to the appropriate bin.whatever
- Do the same procedure with STSDAS, putting the source in
/iraf/extern/stsdas and the binaries in the appropriate /iraf/extern/stsdas/bin.something directory, also fixing the bin symlink.
- Edit the extern.pkg file (often, this merely involves un-commenting (removing the #) from a few lines).
Then you should be good to go. Questions? Feel free to leave a comment.
.
A (you guessed it, untested) .pkg installer of GUIAPPS for Intel Macs is available on the downloads page. Here’s a direct download link for the impatient.
You might notice I’m making Intel versions of a lot of the smaller packages, and ignoring the elephant in the room, STSDAS. PPC Mac users may also be annoyed that I’m putting up newer and Tiger savvy versions and of installers for Intel Macs, when PPC installers are languishing. These are all good points.
I’ll get around to STSDAS and TABLES sometime. Hopefully, no one will run off and start using scisoft any time soon.
.
This is probably repeating a lot of content scattered throughout the site, but I figured I’d mention sort of super-useful programs that I use almost daily when working. All this software is Universal, I believe, so it runs natively on Intel and PPC Macs.
TextWrangler from the makers of BBEdit, an excellent free text editor which can even open files remotely over sftp or ftp and also integrates nicely with …
Fugu a great graphical front in for the built-in SFTP client.
(Transmit is an even better FTP/SFTP/etc program, but it is not free. Lots of Mac-like features though.)
Preview, which is part of OS X, has a handy feature in that it can crop PDFs (in the Tools menu) and you can also copy, say a Figure, from a PDF paper and then do a “New image from Clipboard.” The copying preserves the vector information in the PDF so it’s much better than using a screen capture.
Btw, the basic screen capture keyboard shortcuts. Shift-Command-3 to take the whole screen, Shift-Command-4 to select part of the screen. These will create PNG files on the desktop. Add the control key to either shortcut and it’ll send the screen capture to the clipboard.
Texshop is my favorite front end for tetex/latex. There are links at the Texshop page for installing TeTex but like for so many other thing I install tetex using …
Fink. Fink has ports of hundreds of unix programs that run in OS X, and a relatively easy way to install them and their dependencies using the included FinkCommander. Installing Fink the first time is usually a cinch… when Apple updates OS X to 10.5, however, upgrading Fink is always much more a headache than it should be. But I use Fink to install the enlightenment (my favorite window manager), zoinks (a graphical (gasp!) X11 text editor), and most importantly Fink is how I install …
grace, a fantastic 2D plot program which can produce PDF, EPS, JPG, GIF, and you name it output. The PDFs are vector-based and look fantastic, and it has an excellent WYSIWYG editor to control all the aspects of the plots. It’s a million times better than gnuplot. I still use IDL to create some of my plots on the fly, but for most – Grace is the way to go.
Just a few other programs I’ll mention briefly, Graphicconverter is the swiss army knife of Mac graphical software, and worth every penny. Synk 6 is a great backup utility, and has cool “zeroscan” functionality. Time Machine in Tiger may make it moot, but I do like Synk. I like to use Fire for instant messaging, though for some reason everyone uses Adium, which I still don’t understand.
.
Well, apparently the nifty search box in the sidebar only searched posts and not the WordPress “pages” which are linked to in the top navigation bar. Those links include the primary installation guides for installing IRAF, X11IRAF, etc.
Thanks to the lovely search everything plug in, you can now search the pages as well as the posts.
.
So, because of the way I imported the old material, there are bound to be a lot of dead links. Please, leave comments on posts or send me email so I can improve things.
I’m working on improving the installer situation. Perhaps after the 17th I’ll have a bit more time for that… Frankly, just downloading and uploading things like STSDAS take a good long while.
.
I can’t test this one either, but Intel X11IRAF 1.5DEV is available on the download page It puts everything where the normal x11iraf installer would put things, in /usr/local. You’ll need /usr/local/bin in your PATH to be able to run xgterm, ximtool, and the like.
Anyone who uses it successfully, leave a comment!
Download X11IRAF 1.5DEV for Intel Macs .pkg Installer
.