The archive of Macsingularity
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.
Tags: IDL, Leopard — .A common problem with the IRAF installers is that / is sometimes not writeable by the admin group, and thus the “iraf user” can’t write files to the root of the hard drive. To see what goes wrong with the installer, please check the installer log. You can see a screenshot here.
If it’s something about permissions, making / writeable by the admin will probably fix it (assuming IRAF is an admin user, as I suggest)
sudo chmod g+w /
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.
Tags: Leopard, unix, x11, xquartz — .The excellent Papers has been updated to 1.5 and includes additional search engines as well as the ability to use search engine plug-ins. New search engines include Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. No ADS yet but Google Scholar does an okay job finding ADS and ApJ papers.
It also boasts improved Leopard compatibility and is still 29 Euros (I think there are some student discounts.)
(via MacResearch)
Tags: ADS, bibtex, journals, Leopard, papers, PDF — .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.
Tags: apple, Leopard, unix, x11 — .Update at the bottom
According to commenter Erin, the Spot and Leopard tools from Spitzer don’t work on OS X 10.5 due to a Java issue. I haven’t tested this myself but I’ll try to verify this evening when I’m back on a Mac running Leopard (and Leopard, boy that’s confusing.)
There have been conflicting reports about Java on Leopard. Many have complained about a lack of Java 6, some have said that Java 5 is broken too, and others have said Java 5 works just fine. The Spitzer Science Site itself is saying:
Spot and Leopard have not yet been tested under Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard). We strongly recommend that users not upgrade their OS prior to the Cycle-5 proposal deadline.
That seems like very sound advice.
Update I just tested Spitzer Leopard, seems to work fine in … Leopard. Spot seems to work too, but I did not in anyway test in rigorously. I wouldn’t upgrade before the proposal deadline, just to be safe.
Tags: java, Leopard, spitzer, spot — .Ok, so I’ve obviously been doing a lot of Leopard posts. I’ll try to round things up here.
I should say that if you’re upgrading, uninstall unsanity’s “application enhancer” and be advised that it may be installed by some other utility you use – I think it appears as a preference pane if it’s installed. Old versions seem to cause some problems with Leopard. I stay away from things like Application Enhancer for this reason. Oh, the Logitech Control Center foolishly installs APE and so you may have it without knowing it. I have never installed any 3rd party mouse drivers – I just plug in their mice and it works so I never knew what the drivers would do.
Personally, I think Leopard is a great upgrade. As John Gruber pointed out, it’s almost a death by 1000 cuts approach. Yeah, there are big new features like Time Machine and Spaces but there are lots of small improvements in a lot of ways. The new Network system preference pane, the new Software Update (with a “not now” option for restarts). The most comprehensive review (which still doesn’t touch on everything new) is of course John Siracusa’s at Ars Technica, which also talks about the additional abilities added for developers.
Time Machine makes it absurdly easy for backing up, even with a laptop. Every time I plug in the firewire drive Time Machine immediately starts churning and does a backup and it usually is over in a few minutes. I thought Synk was easy but this is even easier. I like the data detectors ability in Mail for adding events to iCal. Spotlight is much faster. I’m starting to miss features from Leopard when I come to work to my Mac Pro so … that’s usually a good sign. However, stacks are annoying (especially since the icon for a folder in the dock now can be especially meaningless and indistinguishable).
The biggest problem to astronomers is that all this X11 business is annoying for those of us who use X11 a lot. I think in the long term this move to a new codebase, etc. will be positive but for now, for me, the problem with no full screen X11 is a deal breaker. I’m going to try the revert-to-Tiger X11 tonight and see how that works. Hopefully, we’ll see improvements to X11.app shortly in Leopard itself. If you don’t use Leopard full screen, there are still some things are still buggy in Leopard. Namely, there seem to problem with the “Application” menu, an xterm always launches, and some programs (like ds9) don’t like the DISPLAY variable trickery that X11.app now uses. And, X11 doesn’t seem to play nicely with Spaces.
However, the upside is that you can use the Terminal.app to launch x11 programs now without weird crashes about DISPLAY not found or whatever. I think eventually this will go well, but for now Leopard’s X11 has some problem. I wish they had just held back on the changes until everything was up and running.
So, if you’re in the middle of some X11-intensive project, I wouldn’t go buy Leopard and install it today, as you may encounter some unexpected bumps. I put Leopard on my Macbook which pretty much does no IRAF or IDL these days so my astronomical productivity is unaffected.
Tags: apple, Leopard, OS X — .Updated at the bottom | Second Update
So, here’s the quasi-official word from Ben Byer, one of Apple’s x11 developers on Apple’s x11-users list.
Biggest architectural change in Leopard for X11: Switched from XFree86 codebase (based on, IIRC, X11R6.8) to X.org codebase (X11R7.2)
Biggest user-visible change: launchd support for X11. The only situation where you should need to manually start X11.app is if you are only running remote X11 applications.
The way that this is accomplished is by some slight-of-hand with the $DISPLAY variable — if you look, it should be something like “/tmp/ launch-vbXRyu/:0″. If an X client connects to this, it will actually connect to launchd, which will start Xquartz if needed and pass the client’s socket to the server.
All of that should be invisible to you; the X client library (libX11.dylib) was modified to support this, and all X11 applications link against this library. “DISPLAY=:0″ would still work if X11.app is already running, but it will not trigger X11 to launch.
Two biggest bugs:
Fullscreen support is broken. I know many of you will hate me for this — it stopped working when we switched codebases, and I was unable to get it working again. I’m hoping that some of you developers may be able to help me us fix this. Until then, those of you who need this functionality should be able to use the X11 package from Tiger instead. (Yes, I know you can’t officially download that from www.apple.com — I would like to see that change and am working on making that happen; no ETA. You may be able to find a copy of it lying around somewhere.)
Do not start X11.app from the Dock. It will do strange things — you’ll get two icons. This is due to the aforementioned “launcher” in /Applications/Utilities/X11.app not being the same as the real server, which is now located at /usr/X11/X11.app.
I should also note that the DISPLAY variable mojo doesn’t seem to play nice with darwin ds9, since it looks like the ds9 launch script is checking the DISPLAY variable for something it likes.
You can use Tiger’s X11 on Leopard, and instructions for that have been written up here. Not too complicated but you’ll need a Tiger DVD of some kind.
So, if anyone out there has installed Leopard and X11, could you leave a comment if you can enable full screen mode and then successfully “Toggle Full Screen?” The menu item becomes active when I enable the option in preferences and restart X11, but when I choose it simply does nothing when I try it. So, I’m stuck in non-full-screen mode. I don’t know if this is a bug in Leopard or just a problem I’m having.
It’s happening in both my user accounts though.
Update – More on X11 So, Apple has apparently changed more than a few things about X11. For example, if you know type “xterm” in the regular Apple terminal it won’t crap out and give a “can’t get to display error” but it launches X11 and runs the xterm. That’s cool. But, the full screen thing problem persists.
Update II They’re also doing some weird mojo on the DISPLAY variable, it’s set to something like /tmp/launch-onrFOA/:0 and that confused the heck of out ds9. I was able to fix it by setting to display to :0.0 like … well, it normally would be.
.So, I installed Leopard about 5 hours ago or so, and here are just random initial reactions on my white Macbook (Core 2 Duo).
Updated at the bottom
That’s all for now. I wonder how long until Fink releases a new point release and the headache that usually is.
I haven’t actually installed IRAF on this machine… I’ll do that over the weekend. I’d be very surprised if anything broke though. Except the X11 full screen thing I already mentioned but most of you probably use the Quartz-wm anyway.
Update Juan Cabanela reports that you can change shell and home directory location, etc. in the accounts preference pane which you can read about at Macworld.
Tags: Leopard, OS X — .Bad Behavior has blocked 573 access attempts in the last 7 days.