Installation for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

The installation is far from pain-free for people with the shiny new Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Installation of everything is possible, but quite convoluted because the developers of many of the packages below haven't got up to speed with Leopard yet.

There are lots of hacks and workarounds that you'll need to follow. Where possible, we've created our own binary packages to simplify the process.

1. Python

Python 2.5.1 is already installed by default on Mac OS X 10.5, so we don't need to install a new version. The bad news it isn't recommended.

There is a newer version (2.5.4) available from the Python website, which we will use.

The general Python 2.5 installation instructions are available here.

To install Python, you can download the disk image installer (.dmg) for Python 2.5.4 directly and run it.

2. Python Modules

To check Python has been installed correctly, and you are using version 2.5.4, you should open a Terminal window and type: 

~$ python
Python 2.5.4 (r254:67917, Dec 23 2008, 14:57:27) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5363)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

and you should see that you are using Python 2.5.4 and not an older version.

2.1 scientific python packages for Intel OS X Leopard

We recommend using the ai2009_py_installer.sh.gz to install ipython, numpy, matplotlib and scipy. It also checks if the correct version of python is used.

Extract and run it as follows: 

gunzip ai2009_py_installer.sh.gz
sh ai2009_py_installer.sh

2.2 SOAPpy and fpconst (Web services library)

SOAPpy and fpconst are libraries that require manual installation. SOAPpy needs fpconst to handle special floating point values such as infinity and NaN (not a number).

Unfortunately, SOAPpy hasn't been updated for a couple of years and Python 2.5 now catches some errors which were previously ignored by older versions of Python.

To overcome these problems, we've created a binary installation package for fpconst and SOAPpy.

Download fpconst-0.7.2-py2.5.egg.gz and SOAPpy-0.12.0-py2.5.egg.gz extract and install as follows: 

gunzip fpconst-0.7.2-py2.5.egg.gz
sudo easy_install fpconst-0.7.2-py2.5.egg

gunzip SOAPpy-0.12.0-py2.5.egg.gz
sudo easy_install SOAPpy-0.12.0-py2.5.egg

Once SOAPpy and fpconst are installed you should be able to go: 

>>> import fpconst
>>> import SOAPpy

in the interactive Python interpreter and it should not return an error message.

2.3 MySQLdb (MySQL client library)

We are using the MySQL database in the course. To access the database server from within Python you need the MySQLdb module installed.

MySQLdb is yet another package without a pre-built binary for Python 2.5 and Leopard. All you should need to do is download MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.5-macosx-10.3-i386.egg.gz and 

gunzip MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.5-macosx-10.3-i386.egg.gz
sudo easy_install MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.5-macosx-10.3-i386.egg

Summary of the Python module files to install

If you download and run these you will have everything above:

3. MySQL (MySQL database server)

As well as installing the MySQLdb client library for Python (above) you also need to install the MySQL server itself. We will be using the Open Source community server version 5.0.27 available from here. The Mac OS X package files are a long way down the page, and there are separate binary installers for Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 (for older Power PC Macs and newer Intel Macs). You just need the standard installation package.

4. Subversion (version control tools)

Mac OS X 10.5 comes with subversion 1.4.4 installed.

5. Bash shell/Unix tools

Mac OS X comes with all of the tools we need already!

6. Java runtime environment

If you have been keeping up with the Mac OS X automatic updates you will have a recent enough version of Java to run Aladin without any problems.

7. Aladin (VO-enabled Sky Atlas)

We are using Aladin version 5 which can be downloaded from the Aladin stand-alone download page. There are a variety of different versions plus a jar file (labelled as piece by piece). We need to use the jar version because we need to set the web proxy before Aladin loads. Please download the three jar files: Aladin.jar.

We will explain how to run it during the summer school.