Urania

A blog named for the muse of Astronomy containing musings by an astronomer

Archive for June 5th, 2009


Scisoft OSX 2009.6.1 Released 2

Posted on June 05, 2009 by admin

Nor Pirzkal has apparently been busy fixing the issues I noted in last month’s release of Scisoft OSX given his blog entry:

Scisoft OSX Intel 2009.6.1 Released

This version updates the STSDAS/TABLES packages and a few other packages.
It also fixes the issues pointed out by J. Cabanela

The new version of Scisoft OSX 2009.6.1 differs from Scisoft OSX 2009.5.2 in the following ways:

  • Stiff was updated from version 1.10 to version 1.12
  • HEASARC fv.app was updated from version 5.1 to version 5.2.1 and properly installed.
  • HEASARC hera.app was updated from version 5.1 to version 5.2.1 and properly installed.
  • HEASARC StudentHera.app was updated from version 5.1 to version 5.2.1 and properly installed.
  • SAOImage DS9 was updated to version 5.6.3 from version 5.3b.
  • Interestingly, the STSDAS and TABLES IRAF packages are still version 3.10, so I am not sure what updates Nor refers to above for STSDAS/TABLES.

The only glitch I noticed is that permissions problems persist. Specifically, when the installer installs Scisoft OSX, 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 administrator’s username, in most cases, your username) to perform the repair. I know Nor spent a bit of time trying to resolve this without success last summer, so its a glitch that will probably persist.

I also have a minor gripe. This is not a bug, so much a feature I prefer. I like having the X11 command-line version of ds9 available, so I manually installed the current ds9 command line binary into /Applications/scisoft/i386/bin/.

The current version of Scisoft OSX is available for download from the Scisoft OSX website (or will be shortly) and I have made the package available on my Scisoft OSX mirror as well.

Category Astronomical Software, MacOS X, SciSoft OSX



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