MacSingularity Archive » Leopard

Installing Xcode

admin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:45:49 +0000

A friend recently needed a Fortran compiler, and I pointed her to the useful high performance computing. However, things didn’t work and that’s because the program also needed to Apple’s developer tools – which include a compiler, etc. – to install properly.

Xcode is usually included somewhere when you buy a new Mac. Either a disc image hiding somewhere on the hard drive or on the DVD that came with your machine. If all those things fail, or you don’t want to look around, it’s also available at the ADC site for free. You simply must register for free ADC “Online Membership.” The advantage of downloading is that you will get the latest version. Be advised to make sure you’re getting a version of Xcode that works on your version of OS X.

The latest Xcode runs on the latest OS X, so today that means that Xcode 3.1 works on Leopard only. You should be able to find an older version for Tiger.

At the web site, look for Developer Tools and then Xcode 3.1.

The only real trick after downloading them and installing them is to customize the install, and I only do this to save disk space. But unless you’re going to develop a real Mac OS X app, you don’t need all the documentation and examples. It’ll save you about half a gigabyte. You want to uncheck “Core Reference Library” and be sure that the “UNIX Development Support” is checked.

Leopard X11 Page at MacOSForge

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:35:42 +0000

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.

IRAF 2.14 Available – Installers forthcoming here.

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:35:24 +0000

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.

Airport Menu Trick in Leopard

admin — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 19:42:25 +0000

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.

Some more notes on Leopard

admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:30:43 +0000

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.

IDL 6.4.1 patch for Leopard Compatibility

admin — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:18:41 +0000

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.

Some unofficial improvements to X11 on Leopard

admin — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:52:29 +0000

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.

Papers 1.5 released

admin — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:14:10 +0000

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)

Apple's X11 User Mailing list

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:57:03 +0000

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.

Spitzer's Java based tools "Spot" and "Leopard" untested on … Leopard

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:37:53 +0000

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.