Comments on: Leopard Roundup

By: Urania » Blog Archive » Scisoft OSX 2007.11.1 Released

Urania » Blog Archive » Scisoft OSX 2007.11.1 Released — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:38:26 +0000

[...] switch until the winter break, when I have time to deal with all the X11 issues it creates, notably running SAOImage DS9), so I can’t confirm the ability to run under Leopard, but its great to know they are keeping [...]

By: Marcos

Marcos — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:31:41 +0000

Yikes, thanks for the note. I had heard mixed things about Java in Leopard – some said it was bad; others said it worked quite well. I didn’t have Spot or Leopard on my Macbook so I didn’t test it on Leopard (just on my Mac Pro.) I’m going to go ahead about post a story on this.

By: Erin

Erin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:41:37 +0000

Not that too many people will be worried but with astro deadlines coming up:

The Spot and Leopard programs from Spitzer (observation planning/proposal tool and archive interfaces respectively) do not work with OS X Leopard due to a java issue. The Sppitzer proposal deadline is Nov 16th, so those who want to propose and only have a Mac based system at their disposal should stick to Tiger.

(and yes I'm a crazy who uses full screen for x11 but that's just a personal preference to be able to watch all the IRAF messages scroll by as it chugs on my data.)

By: Marcos

Marcos — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:53:59 +0000

I would argue most people probably don't use X11 full screen. I seem to be in the minority there and I just prefer it and use the enlightenment window manager and have just gotten used to that setup.

The new X11 in Leopard actually handles all the DISPLAY stuff on its own so with the exception of DS9, should not require you to do any "script trickery" to get the Terminal to launch X11 programs. In fact, I think you have to make sure you don't set DISPLAY yourself for Leopard x11 to work.

I think the other problems in Leopard x11 are ... the application menu, some sort of yellow cursor bug and ... well that other poster on a different post talked about low bandwidth X or something like ... I don't know, I only use X11 remotely over ssh so I'm not exactly sure how much bandwidth that's using.

I encourage those who are really interested in all these issues to check out the x11-users list at Apple, which ... I linked to somewhere but not so much to the subscribe page.... hmm

By: Jessica

Jessica — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:52:10 +0000

I am just curious as to why everyone uses X11 full screen? Are there particular X11 astronomy applications that need this? Mostly, I use the Terminal app and X11 is only there for display purposes for PyRAF, etc.

In my .cshrc file in Tiger I use some script trickery to set the DISPLAY parameter correctly in Terminal. Anyone have any idea if this is going to work in Leopard with all the changes to how DISPLAY gets set?

[ duplicate message to that in "X11 Full Screen" ]