Urania

Because a reader of this blog contacted me to inform me that the official Scisoft OSX download links appear to be down (scisoftosx.dyndns.org is not resolving), I have placed a mirror of the latest versions for both PPC and MacIntel online here. I will take down this mirror if the maintainers of Scisoft OSX ask, but at least for now, it is online.

The latest XQuartz release (2.1.1) finally fixes one of the major annoyances I was having with X11 under Leopard. Because the X11.app program under Leopard is really an xterm launcher, starting X11 always started an xterm window. This has now been fixed. All you need to do is install the new XQuartz package (WARNING: Because this changes the launch daemon settings, you will need to restart the computer afterwards) and then once you have rebooted, type the following command into the terminal:

defaults write org.x.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true

And you have xterm-free X11 again. Furthermore, this updates xterm as well, so even though I don’t want xterm to launch automatically with X11, I am happy to have it updated.

If you can get through the slowish, stylish first minute, this is one of the better parody videos I have seen recently. It describes the travails of planetary astronomers working at the IRTF (Infra-Red Telescope Facility) at the 14,000 foot high Mauna Kea observatories. To paraphrase the YouTube description:

Experience the plight of astronomers at the 14,000-foot summit of Mauna Kea! Veteran observers John Annen, Juan Delgado (flamenco guitar), Kelly Fast (vocals and 12-string guitar), Ted Kostiuk, and Tim Livengood took the HIPWAC spectrometer to the IRTF observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii and were inspired to write the lyrics to “Hotel Mauna Kea”. Here, Juan, Kelly and Ted perform the song and all co-investigators star in this above-the-clouds music video. “Hotel Mauna Kea” is a parody of The Eagles’ “Hotel California” by Felder, Henley, and Frey.

While I have never observed at Mauna Kea, this video brought back some memories of observing at remote locations like CTIO and Mount Hopkins. Thanks to Jeff Larsen for letting me know about this video.

I decided I should clean up my laptop’s left over digital crap, so I went through my /usr/local directories cleaning out ancient libraries installed two OSes ago (after making a backup first). I decided I would try reinstalling MacPorts under Leopard, if only to build it clean and remove the old source code siting around from various revisions to the packages over time.First, I installed MacPorts from the disk image for Leopard. Then I attempted to install my usual suspects: sudo port install aquaterm chmdump contacts coreutils curl file findutils g95 ghostscript gv ImageMagick ksh93 latex2rtf lynx macutil osxutils plotutils subversion teTeX tidy vim wget wine xterm xephem Long story short, almost everything works but there were a few key packages that failed to build under MacOS X 10.5.1. This also reminded me that when a package fails to build, you should “port clean” the package (see examples below) before attempting to rebuild it:

• I discovered that teTeX failed to build. This appears to be due to an undeclared dependancy on openmotif. So after the failed install, I just did ansudo port clean --work teTeX; sudo port install openmotif teTeXand teTeX installed just fine.
• In attempting to build subversion I discovered that one of the packages subversion needs, sqlite3, fails to install on Leopard. This appears to be due to an undeclared dependancy on nawk (MacPorts Report Ticket #13500). So again, all I had to do was:sudo port clean --work sqlite3; sudo port install nawk subversionand it worked. I should note that a fairly recent version of subversion now comes with Leopard, version 1.4.4 (as opposed to 1.4.5 with MacPorts).
• gv fails to install unless you patch it. This was reported to MacPorts (Bug Report Ticket #13095). [If you check that bug ticket, you will find a new patch-setenv.c file is available there. If you download that file and replace /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/print/gv/files/patch-setenv.c with it, gv will compile and install just fine.]
• osxutils fails almost immediately with a series of errors about conflicting types. Since osxutils did a lot of meta-data manipulation, I am not completely surprised it is broken under Leopard. I have submitted a bug report to MacPorts.
• xterm fails to build. This is irritating because I haven’t had time to confirm is the old xterm Tektronix emulation bug present in the Tiger version of xterm is still present. [This appears to have been cleared up with MacPorts 1.6 if you install Xquartz over the Apple installed X11 server. Doing this is a good idea anyway.]
• wine fails to build (already reported elsewhere). This has already been reported in MacPorts Bug Report Ticket #13488. I wonder if this is related to the possibility being mentioned of Leopard having unreported support for Windows binary execution. [Wine version 0.9.51 DOES compile under Leopard just fine.]
• I can’t build g95 because odcctools fails to compile. This has been reported in MacPorts Bug Report Ticket #13148. [This appears to have been fixed as of January 24, 2008.]
• xephem fails to build because lesstif builds but fails to install. Actually lesstif installed fine once I moved /usr/share/aclocal/ac_find_motif.m4 out of the way. I don’t know if that file was there from my previous install of lesstif. Once lesstif was out of the way, xephem failed to build. Interestingly, MacPorts has version 3.7, I downloaded the source for xephem 3.7.2 from the Clear Sky Institute website, compiled it following the installation instructions without a hitch. I submitted a bug report as MacPorts Bug Report Ticket #13524 (turned out my bug report was a duplicate of MacPorts Bug Report Ticket #13498). This has been fixed, see this post. [This appears to have been fixed as of March 3, 2008.]

I’m actually surprised the number of packages that failed to compile seems pretty small.

To quote iraf.net:

As of September 2007, NOAO has resumed development of IRAF on a limited scale, although primary responsibility for user support remains at the community IRAF.NET web site. IRAF V2.14 is a formalized version of the IRAF.NET V2.13 releases previously made available by iraf.net.

The major version number increase is meant to disambiguate NOAO releases from earlier versions and to provide a clean code base for future development. Unlike earlier ‘major’ IRAF releases that contained substantial new functionality, this release may seem a bit lacking. Support for Intel-based Mac and Cygwin platforms is the key highlight as well as many unseen but required maintenance/viability changes. A number of new tasks and features have been added, either inherited from the V2.13 releases or done as part of external package development.

It appears a full installation is required, even if you have previously installed IRAF 2.13. I won’t be upgrading until SciSoft OS X is upgraded (there is a beta I am playing with of SciSoft, but it has IRAF 2.13 in it). Marcos Huerta is already playing with it so those of you needing package installers of (just) IRAF 2.14 will probably get your wish soon enough.

Found this nice blog documenting Leopard and X11 issues. On there I found a note that the updated XQuartz package [link now points to page for newer packages] with various fixes for Leopard has been released. I’ll be trying it out shortly.

Well, I think I have ironed out most of my issues with X11 and I am actually very happy with it. But if you are not as happy, check out the X11-Users FAQ. It contains information about how to tackle the following:

• If you really hate the new way X11 uses a custom DISPLAY environmental variable to trigger launchd to launch X11.app, the FQ contains information on how to disable the launchd trigger and then revert to the Tigerish behavior of manually launching X11.app (HINT: Don’t use /Applications/Utilities/X11.app, use /usr/X11/X11.app instead.
• Information on installing Tiger’s X11 on Leopard. Apparently, it can be done without clobbering Leopard’s X11 install.

Really, very useful, even if you don’t mind the new X11, since it illuminates a bit about how this X11 has bee changed. Oh, and it looks like future X11 updates will be made available at a new MacForge website. I hope a nicer set of packages for X11 is available soon, the only big irritation has been my X11 windows slipping under the menubar!