Setting up the OS X Machines

I assume you're running 10.3. I assume you are logged in as an account with admin privileges, or at least know the account/password for one.

This is not about routine system admin for Mac OS X, which I take to be relatively self-evident. Or you can call the Help Desk if it isn't. What I am attempting to document is my recommended steps to make it more crystallography friendly.

A Useful Website

Bill Scott maintains an exceptionally useful set of links related to crystallography on OSX. It's highly recommended reading for anyone attempting this.

Install the Developer Tools

They are actually on your hard drive under /Applications/Installers. Install the Developer Tools in the default location as the default install. This gives you libraries, C, C++ and Fortran compilers which will prove to be exceptionally useful for anything crystallographic.

Install the X11 Environment

X11 is the windowing system used by SGI and Linux, and so most crystallographic programs use X. You can get X11 for OSX from Apple and the SDK libraries from here. Install the contents of both. Find the X11.app and launch it. Put it either in your Dock or as a startup item.

Install Sundry Applications

Personally I like all sorts of other applications, and you should at least consider them:

Find the Terminal App

If you don't already have the Terminal app or iTerm in your Dock, find Terminal or iTerm and put it in there - those are your main routes to a Unix shell window. Note that as a default the OSX shell runs bash. If you don't like that you might want to make it use zsh or tcsh, but I forget how to do that - something via Terminfo, or perhaps the command chsh.

Install Various Site-wide Apps

Log into MSKCC server macbeth.mskcc.org as "guest" and look in their OSX directory. There are a bunch of Disk Images (.dmg) files that contain various applications that can be installed on OSX. These applications have the license codes inside the Disk Image, ready for entry during installation.

Installing Other Unix Apps

Quite a lot of the standard Unix apps are available via Fink. See Bill Scott's Fink page for details how to get started. Things like PovRay, Xemacs, ImageMagick are all available via Fink for reasonably fast and simple installation once you've got Find configured. This greatly simplifies the default installation.

Installing Crystallographic Apps

How to go about this, whether to put everything in /usr/local or to put it in an "xtal" sfotware account, is a matter of personal taste. However I have accumulated a few OSX-specific software files on ~xtal/OSX/10.3 under the Linux xtal account. Many others are available via the Web. For MSKCC usage, assume that if we have it on Linux, you are able to use it on OSX without further licensing issues (but certain programs like HKL require per-machine licenses, or SOLVE will require you to put a license key in a specific place, etc). You'll have to battle per-package software installation issues yourself.

Phil Jeffrey, Nov 2004