Urania

Nor Pirzkal has released a minor update to Scisoft OSX. He states in his blog that:

This version should fix a few outstanding bugs in version 2009.6.1. People running on case sensitive file system will hopefully stopped having problems. This version otherwise upgrades a few minor packages as described in the NEWS and CONTENTS files.

This version requires OSX Intel 10.5.x or higher. It also works fine with OSX 10.6.0 and OSX 10.6.1.

From reviewing the CONTENTS file distributed with the install, the major changes from the previous version as as he indicated, quite minor. They include:

• The following Python packages were updated:
• • matplotlib 0.99 (upgraded from version 0.98.5.2)
  • pyraf 1.8 (upgraded to the current release version from version 1.7.1)
  • pygsl 0.9.4 (upgraded from version 0.9.3)
  • mxDateTime 3.1.2 was added to the distribution. Adds certain useful date manipulation functions to the python installation.
  • pysao 2.1.8 was added to the distribution. This appears to add direct XPA communication capability between python scripts and SAOImage DS9.

• The gsl library was update from version 1.11 to 1.13.
• [From NEWS file] Changed ds9 [command line] unix version a [symbolic] link from an alias. I noticed the SAOImage DS9 website currently says “Note: the next release of DS9, version 5.7, will be available October 15th.”
• [From NEWS file] Fixed references to “packages” to “Packages” in Setup scripts

The glitches I have noticed in this distribution

• As with previous versions, the installer for Scisoft OSX (due to bugs, apparently in Apple’s installer.app) changes the ownership of /Applications after the install. I would run Disk Utility and Fix the Permissions on your root volume after installing Scisoft OSX.
• [Added Sept. 23] Gordon Richards and I have have been investigating some serious annoyances with the python installation on Snow Leopard in this version of SciSoft OSX.
  1. First of all, the installer apparently doesn’t install /Applications/scisoft/i386/Packages/Python-2.5.4/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/Resources/Python.app/ when running on Snow Leopard. This directory contains the python executable. Therefore, in the new SciSoft OSX on Snow Leopard, you can’t run python from the clean install. If you manually copy this directory from the previous SciSoft OSX installation to this one, then I find you can run python again (or in my case, pyraf). I can confirm this directory is apparently installed under Leopard.
  2. On Snow Leopard, Gordon Richards discovered that if you attempt ‘import pylab’ in python, you get a bus error. I can confirm the same error occurs on my Snow Leopard machine using either this SciSoft OSX release or the previous one. Furthermore, I can confirm the error DOES NOT occur in Leopard. I am not a heavy Python user, so I will leave it to Gordon, Nor, and others to investigate this issue. Gordon notes that this blog posting contains instructions for getting pylab installed under a vanilla Snow Leopard install, in case you need them.

The current version of Scisoft OSX is available for download from the Scisoft OSX website, but I have made the package available on my Scisoft OSX mirror as well, in case it is faster for people.

I recently updated my laptop, an old Core Duo MacBook Pro, to Snow Leopard to test out the new OS. There have been a lot of little annoyances and a lot of little benefits to the move.

Some of the improvements I have noticed:

• Snow Leopard is noticeably faster! I had thought it might just be fan-boy talk, but this operating system is in fact noticably faster at launching applications and the like. It is especially nice to no longer see the beachball every few minutes in the Finder. In fact, I don’t think I have seen that dreaded rainbow beachball int he Finder since upgrading!
• Cisco VPN is built in! Like the iPod Touch, Cisco VPN networking is now built-in, so all I had to do was configure it as one of my network interfaces. Thank you Apple! If you previously had it installed, you can uninstall Cisco’s crappy little VPN client using the command:sudo /usr/local/bin/vpn_uninstall
• QuickLook works in the Open/Save Dialog Boxes: Just as in the Finder, you can now hit the spacebar with a file selected in an Open/Save dialog box and you get a previous of the file’s contents. Sweet. QuickLook was probably the most useful feature I use everyday in Leopard, so I am glad to see it available in Open/Save dialog boxes as well.
• I can see Hidden Files in the Open/Save Dialog Boxes: Credit this to MacOS X Hints, but in the Open-Save Dialog box, if I hit ‘Command-Shift-.’ (that’s a period), you can see the hidden files in a given directory. If you use your mac in a region where commas are normally used to as a decimal separate, you have to use the comma from the numerical keypad instead of the period. Very useful for people who edit .tcshrc or .bashrc files regularly.

Some of the annoyances I have been ironing out during the last week:

• X11 now knows more about user environment: I use tsch as my shell environment. Apparently X11 on Snow Leopard loads the ~/.tcshrc file to set the system enviroment! I had a bug in the file that prevented X11 from launching. I was able to figure out it was local to my account by creating a test user account and launching X11 without a hitch. I was able to find the bad library path and fix it in the ~/.tcshrc and now my X11 works fine.
• Battery Issues with Snow Leopard: I had issues with the battery under Snow Leopard. The battery life that was being reported was half what it had been before the upgrade. This seemed very odd to me, but the system profiler app insisted that after 183 charge cycles I had only 1949 mAh of power. So to ‘recalibrate’ I started up the computer after it went to sleep due to ‘low power’. It ran for another hour, reporting 0% battery the entire time. It then did a hard shutdown. I left it off and unplugged overnight, I then charged it full. It still reported only 1949 mAh total charge. I called Apple’s tech support which elevated the report to engineering. Then, after ’safe booting’ the machine (see notes below), and booting back into my normal setup, I discovered the battery level was being reported as 4300 mAh, as it should be. Now, as of this morning, the problem is back again and System Profiler insists the battery has only 2870 mAh of maximum charge and it requires service. Not sure what the problem was, but a lot of people have been having similar problems with this particular battery and snow leopard.
  [Followup (added Oct. 23, 2009): Apple replaced the battery and the problem went away.  It is possible that the number of people reporting the problem is just indicative of a small percentage of users whose bad batteries were not obvious to them before Snow Leopard.]
  
• Ethernet Issues with Snow Leopard: I had major issues with the ethernet connection dropping after a few minutes. Actually, it isn’t a full lost connection, I can still see computers on my subnet, and Skype seems to work, but a large percentage of websites fail to load and mail doesn’t work for off-campus mail servers. Quite a few other people were reporting similar problems on the Apple Discussion boards, but most of them resolved the problem by doing one of the following:
  1. Sometimes corrupt settings persist from a previous setup. Removing all the files in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/ and rebooting will purge all the system settings related to networking. You will also lose settings related to other things, such as Energy Saver settings, but it can help when you can’t isolate the issue. I tried this, it didn’t work in my case
  2. The other solution many people hit on was to create a new “Location” in the Network control panel. If you have a corrupt preference setting in your Location, creating a new one lets you start from scratch. Again, this didn’t work for me.

  After going through all this, I talked to an Apple product specialist and they hit on the idea to try bringing up the computer in ‘Safe Mode‘ by rebooting ahdn holding the shift key during the boot. Safe mode turns off the launching of all non-system deamons and agents as well as turning off the launching of all the programs you might launch at login via your Accounts preference pane “Login Items”. Lo and behold, after doing this, my ethernet connection appears to have been stable! What I did was

  1. I removed Adobe VersionCue CS3 from my launch items in the Accounts preference pane. Adobe noted it was incompatible with Snow Leopard anyway.
  2. I disabled the following launch items by moving them to my Desktop and then rebooting
     

     /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.versioncueCS3.plist
     /Library/LaunchAgents/at.obdev.LittleSnitchNetworkMonitor.plist
     /Library/LaunchAgents/at.obdev.LittleSnitchUIAgent.plist

  Having now brought the computer back up through a normal boot, the ethernet connection has remained stable. The fact that my battery issue seems to have been resolved almost simultaneously makes me think these apps were responsible. [Followup (added Oct. 23, 2009): I narrowed down the problem to an apparent incompatibility between Snow Leopard and the version of BIND my campus is using as a DNS server.  And it may be specific to my machine.  Not sure.  Switching to using OpenDNS as my DNS resolver made the issue go away for me.  My server, a Mac Pro, which I have upgraded to Snow Leopard, has exhibited no such weirdness.]

• MacPorts Rebuild: I traditionally rebuild my MacPorts installation from scratch with a new OS installation. There were no major issues, but I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest MacPorts and to try to rebuild with only the bare minimum of ports that I was using.
• Many Mail Plugins Fail: Most mail plugins use ‘unapproved’ APIs and most of the Mail Plugins I used failed for Snow Leopard’s Mail.app. Furthermore, it looks like Apple has changed things so now every minor revision in the OS will require Mail plugin writers to explicitly approve the plugin for that version of Mail.app. This means in the future every minor revision in Snow Leopard will likely shut down Mail plugins until they get updated.
• Force 32-bit compilation for IRAF in Snow Leopard: Doug Mink has discovered that compiling IRAF packages in Snow Leopard presented errors until he forced 32-bit compilation (I am assuming he was on a 64-bit machine). I am quoting his suggestions (sent to me via email) below:It turns out that Snow Leopard defaults to 64-bits and you need to add the -m32 flag to hlib$fc.csh and hlib$mkpkg.inc just like you have to for 64-bit Linux:

  In fc.csh (Juan’s Note: in Scisoft OSX, this is /Applications/scisoft/all/Packages/iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/fc.csh) after this:
  

  # Scan the argument list and concatenate all arguments.
  set args = ""
  while ("$1" != "")
  set args = "$args $1"
  shift
  end

  
  add this:
  

  if ($MACH == "macintel") then
  print ("MACINTEL: -m32 flag set")
  set args = "$args -m32"
  endif

  
  and in mkpkg.inc (Juan’s Note: In Scisoft OSX, this is /Applications/scisoft/all/Packages/iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/mkpkg.inc for each IRAF package you want to recompile) :
  

  $else $ifeq (MACH, macintel) then
  $set    XFLAGS          = "-c -w -m32"  # default XC compile flags
  $set    XVFLAGS         = "-c -w"       # VOPS XC compile flags
  $set    LFLAGS          = "-Nz -m32"    # default XC link flags

That is my Snow Leopard report for now. More from the trenches and after I upgrade SciSoft OSX.