Comments on: Snow Leopard is Here

By: David

David — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:18:05 +0000

As a note regarding IDL and X11: as noted above, X11 with SL comes is 2.3.4. X11 2.4 does not have a SL installer (Leopard only) that I know of. X11 2.5 (which, btw, is now called Xquartz when installed and does not overwrite the X11.app) installs on 2.5, but IDL’s mouse-plotting window interaction is broken (e.g., zoom does not work properly). So I went back to the X11 2.3.4 which came with SL.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:00:40 +0000

I was able to install iraf/pyraf and matplotlib (I had a problem where I needed to set the architecture to 32-bit). I’m having problems with plotting in both, though. In matplotlib, I can successfully import pylab, but am unable to plot. I’m using the MacOSX backend. It will open a blank window labeled Figure 1, but not actually plot anything. If I try to save the plot to a ps file, the file has errors and will not open.

With pyraf, I am having the problem that when I use implot/splot there are no labels on the axes and no titles. The commands in the window work, but I have no labels.

Has anyone else run into any of these problems and been able to fix them?

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:12:27 +0000

Nate,
I had the same problem with images in IDL 6.4 on a mac pro that
started a few months ago (presumably as a result of an auto software
update or something). On a TVSCL or similar, IDL crashed with a bus
error. Have just installed SL, and the problem persisted
with IDL 6.4. Installed 7.1 and problem seems to be fixed.
cheers,
Jeremy

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:39:10 +0000

All right, last week I just purchased my first mac ever — a 15″ MacBook Pro — came with Snow Leopard. (previously used ubuntu). I’ve been trying to get scisoft distro and the enthought distro to work on my computer. I can get some things in scisoft to work, but never pyraf.
I can get Enthought to work perfectly with everything it comes with, until I try to install/reinstall scisoft, which breaks it almost entirely.

So, I’ve settled for, perfect Enthought distro; non-working scisoft, but I wanto this situation to improve.

My guess is to separate the python distributions (maybe three ways, scisoft/enthought/system?) but I have no idea how to do this. I saw a previous comment that mentioned having separate pythons doing something like this, and I’d like to know how to do this with the distrobutions enthought and scisoft.

Any tips? Ideas? Suggestions to radically change my approach?

By: Nate

Nate — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:14:58 +0000

I waited to buy my new desktop until SL was shipping with new Macs. Today I installed IDL 6.3, and find that it crashes if I try to display an image using tv, tvscl, display, etc. I had similar problems crop up under OS X 10.4 occasionally (after automatic MacUpdates), but installing the latest update of X11 always fixed it. Now X11 (XQuartz 2.3.4) is native to OS X, and there is no SL-supported update as of yet (XQuartz 2.4.0 is for regular Leopard). So, it appears I have an installed IDL that cannot display images. Which is mainly what I work with. Any ideas?

By: Sammy

Sammy — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:58:41 +0000

Sorry to spam again, but seemed that my problems were solved by getting rid off the 2.6.2 Python I had installed. This version seemed to somehow confuse the Framework default 2.6.1 that SL has and cause some architecture mismatches.

By: Sammy

Sammy — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:55:20 +0000

Eli, I noticed the same excellent post few days ago. However, I still have issues with gcc while compiling NumPy. I should check my version of gcc and other compilers and libraries to see where they differ with the default SL installation. It also seems that when compiling 64-bit Python Modules my setup finds a wrong architecture libpython2.6.dylib. I guess this is the pain of having four separate Python installations…

By: Eli

Eli — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:07:11 +0000

Sammy, one more update. I got NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib all working on Snow Leopard now. There are some issues with specific packages in SciPy, but overall it works very well thanks to the following blog post: http://blog.hyperjeff.net/?p=160

By: Sammy

Sammy — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:36:12 +0000

Eli, I have multiple Python setups on my laptop. So far I have tried with the Framework setup, where I have 3.1.1 (only for pure Python) and 2.6 (which used to be my work horse before SL). I haven’t had time to try with the SL system Python, but I assume that things work better with that one. However, there seems to be some confusion with the type mismatch as you noted.
I also have Enthought Python installed, but I have tried to separate it from the system Python. Enthought seems to work fine even after the SL upgrade.

By: Stuart Littlefair

Stuart Littlefair — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:38:01 +0000

Probably too obvious to mention, but I have had all sorts of problems compiling code under Snow Leopard until I realised the default was to create 64-bit object files, which wouldn’t link against my (many) 32-bit libraries I have which were compiled under Leopard. Adding the -arch i386 flag fixed my woes.

No problems so far with the Scisoft OS X versions of python or pyraf..