Urania

Scisoft OSX Intel 2008.9.1 was released yesterday. Nor noted in his blog post about it that this is a bug fix release that

should resolve a few outstanding problems created when changing the location of scisoft from /scisoft to /Applications/scisoft/. Packages such as MIDAS and Gnuplot should now work properly.

This version removes some remaining dependencies on the HPC OSX compilers, which I had on my machine but which most users do not have (and do not want to have).

I compared the /Application/scisoft/i386/Packages directory from this release of Scisoft OSX to the last one and there are no new packages installed. The few issues I noted with the Scisoft OSX 2008.8.1 release all appear to still be valid. Notably:

1. Permission Problems Persist: When the installer installs /Applications/scisoft, it appears that a bug in Apple’s Installer program triggers a change in ownership of the /Applications directory to that of the second user on the system. I strongly suggest checking the ownership of the /Applications directory afterward and if isn’t owned by an administrative user, set it as such using:
   

   sudo chown username:admin /Applications
   

   
   (where “username” is the primary administrative users username, in most cases, your username) to perform the repair.
2. ds9 command line executable missing: This release has the same glitch I noticed in version 2008.8.1 in that /Applications/scisoft/i386/bin doesn’t appear to have a ds9 binary installed. You can fix this by installing the X11 version of ds9 there or by linking to the Aqua version of ds9 that was installed using the command line
   

   ln -s "/Applications/scisoft/i386/Applications/SAOImage DS9.app/Contents/MacOS/ds9" /Applications/scisoft/i386/bin/ds9

I have placed a copy of this release in my Scisoft OSX Mirror in case the main Scisoft OSX repository gets bogged down.