Re: Mac OS Installation Questions

[Marius Schamschula]

On Apr 30, 2006, at 2:37 AM, Ed Selden wrote:

I'll start by saying that I know only a little about the lower levels of the

OS, so I may need to be referred to other written material for novices if

anything like that exists.

Environment: New Intel Mac running Tiger.

Questions:

1. I downloaded the binary file (went to desktop), and from the terminal

window performed the command "sudo tar -xvf octave-bin.tar -C /" as

specified in the directions on the HPC Mac OS site.  Typing "octave",

however, does not work.  What do I need to do? I didn't locate anything

named octave either.  (Note, I later noticed that by double clicking on the

octave tar file in the Mac OS download window, a /usr/local/ set of files

was produced on the desktop.  I assume I can't use this, correct?)

You need to add /usr/local/bin to you PATH variable. Note that the /usr tree is hidden in the Finder by default. The paths you got from extracting using the double click method will likely not work (.dylibs generally have absolute paths).

2. The site also recommends downloading AquaTerm and gnuplot.  When I went

to the AquaTerm site, the download was for PowerPC, so I'm skeptical it will

work so I didn't download it.  Will it work?  Is it needed for octave to

run?  The same goes for gnuplot?

Well, It seems to me, that you will, at some point in time, need to plot some of your results. Thus gnuplot is most useful (at least for the current octave, future versions will support other plotting programs). If you find/build a version of gnuplot built w/o Aquaterm you can use X11. However, Aquaterm is highly recommended. Since I don't have an Intel Mac at this point, I han't tried using PPC binaries of gnuplot or Aquaterm. They may work.

Marius

--

Marius Schamschula,  Alabama A & M University, Department of Physics

    The Center for Hydrology Soil Climatology and Remote Sensing

   http://optics.physics.aamu.edu/ - http://www.physics.aamu.edu/

          http://wx.aamu.edu/ - http://www.aamu.edu/hscars/