Urania

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

A minor revision of Scisoft is available for downloading. Many people are experiencing many problems with the Apple Package Installer and I am distributing this release as a simple tar.gz file.

This version of Scisoft is distributed as a simple tar file that can be un-tarred in /. Scisoft expect to be located in /Applications/scisoft/

I can confirm the CONTENTS file distributed with the install is identical to the file for Scisoft 2009.9.1 so this release may just be a way to avoid some issues with the Apple Package Installer program.

This change to a tarball format is good, but it changes how to install the software. However, there is at least one major glitch in this distribution

• WCSTools is missing from the installation! There are symbolic links to the package, but the /Application/scisoft/i386/Packages/wcstools-3.7.3/ directory is empty! If you are upgrading from a previous version of Scisoft OSX, there is an easy way to recover from this problem. I am outlining my suggested installation routine below.
• As I noted for Scisoft 2009.9.1, “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.”

My suggested routine for upgrading to this version of Scisoft OSX from a previous version is the following:

1. Backup the previous version of Scisoft by renaming the /Application/scisoft/ directory to /Application/scisoft_old/.
2. Download the current gzipped tarball of Scisoft OSX. 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.
3. Using the command line in an administrative account, you can untar the tarball using the command:

   sudo tar -C / -xzvf Scisoft_OSX_macintel_2009.10.1.tar.gz

   You will be asked for your account password to allow ’sudo’ to run the tar command as root.
4. The files are untarred with their ownership intact from when Nor created the tarball, so be sure to change the ownership to match your root account using
   

   sudo chown -R root:admin /Applications/scisoft/

5. Finally, if you want to copy over the WCStools package from the previous Scisoft OSX installation, you can use the command:

   sudo cp -r -p /Applications/scisoft_old/i386/Packages/wcstools-3.7.3/ /Applications/scisoft/i386/Packages/wcstools-3.7.3/

   That should get your back the WCStools.

I have alerted Nor to the missing wcstools directory as well as some other minor issues with this release. Hopefully, if Nor has some time, he will make