Mac Singularity

Leopard X11 Page at MacOSForge

December 4th, 2007 by Marcos

So, those of you who are running Leopard’s X11 may be interested to check out the download page at MacOS Forge which contains all the new changes made to Xquartz/X11, etc. since the release that made it into Leopard. They even have nice .pkg installers for people who want to install the latest versions before they become available in OS X Software Update.

Grab the 2.1.0.1 release and see the changes that have been made over the version in Leopard.

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IRAF 2.14 Available - Installers forthcoming here.

December 4th, 2007 by Marcos

IRAF 2.14 has been announced and is available for download. The Mac (PPC and Intel) versions appear to work properly on both Leopard and Tiger. I’ll try and have installers made for these today. Certainly, I can test the Intel one easily but it’s harder for me to test the PowerPC version so once it’s up if someone out there could test it, that’d be appreciated.

Update The Intel installer is available here - Download IRAF 2.14 for Intel Macs .pkg installer (57MB). My prescribed update method is simple. Change to the IRAF user and do:

  % cd /
  % mv iraf iraf_old

Run the installer and then:

  % mv /iraf_old/extern /iraf/extern/

That should preserve all your external packages. You will most likely want to copy over the extern.pkg from your old install.

  % cd /iraf_old/iraf/unix/hlib
  % cp extern.pkg /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/extern.pkg

That should work. Let me know if there are any problems - it worked ok for me. I’d keep /iraf_old around for a while just to be safe. And remember any installer errors are probably permission issues but be sure to check the log first before emailing me with any problems.

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Airport Menu Trick in Leopard

December 2nd, 2007 by Marcos

Via Daring Fireball, Tidbits has an interesting article on the new Airport Menu in Leopard. While I noticed the new “lock” icon that shows if a network is encrypted or not, the holding-down-option-key trick I did not know about. I like that it shows the transmission rate so you can tell if the connected station is 802.11g/b/n, etc.

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Some more notes on Leopard

November 26th, 2007 by Marcos

Juan Cabanela writes of his Leopard upgrade. Of particular note, there’s a beta of ds9 that seems to play nicer with the way the DISPLAY variable in X11 in Leopard.

Also, for people interested in patching X11 to the latest updates ahead of Apple’s official deployment via software update there is a “quick install” script at the XDarwin wiki that should help that process along.

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IDL 6.4.1 patch for Leopard Compatibility

November 9th, 2007 by Marcos

I’m not running IDL of any stripe on my Macbook, but it would seem there is a patch for IDL 6.4 that will fix compatibility issues you may encounter with Leopard. From what I can tell from this thread the problem sounds related to the X11 changes in Leopard.

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Some unofficial improvements to X11 on Leopard

November 7th, 2007 by Marcos

No full screen yet, but some progress is being made with Apple’s X11, though not officially coming from Apple.com yet.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve posted source and binaries on Xdarwin.org for Xquartz 1.2a7. Since 1.2a6, the following issues have been resolved:

• JIS (Japanese) keyboards are now correctly detected by X11.
• Xvfb and Xnest now compile cleanly; I have not tested them, but binaries are available at http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/
• The “offset-pointer”/”ghost window” bug with Spaces has been
  resolved correctly (this is my second attempt). This means you can
  now use the F8 function to zoom out and drag a window from one Space
  to another with your mouse. Unfortunately, due to a known issue in
  Spaces itself, you can not drag X11 windows to the edge of the screen
  to move them to the next screen.
• A focus problem was fixed — previously, clicking on an X11 window
  that was behind an Aqua window would not always bring the X11 window
  to the foreground (but clicking on any other X11 window usually
  would.) I’m sure I’ll be proven wrong, but at the moment I have fixed
  all of the focus problems that I know about.

…. Ben Byer CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer.

For more details, see the full posting at the X11 users list from Ben.

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Apple’s X11 User Mailing list

November 1st, 2007 by Marcos

You can subscribe and look at the archives to Apple’s X11 User’s mailing list here. Ben Byer has been doing some heroic all hours work to try and fix some problems in X11 in Leopard, mostly from switching code bases and other issues. It’s pretty impressive to see Apple’s staff interacting directly with users like this - I can’t think of any other aspect of OS X where people who work on it are talking directly to people who use it.

Also this forum at macosxhints contains a summary of a lot of recent developments that have been peculating on the mailing list.

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