Rochambeau With Snow Leopard and Python
And I still can’t walk upright . . .
Finally, I decided I was sick of the incompatabilities “modern” software has with OSX 10.4 -Tiger. Like a Rock Solid Visual basic 5 compiler, I threw it to the gutter and got myself a copy of Snow Leopard at a discount since it was an iLife09 version. The last straw was trying to install Google SketchUp only to find out that ONLY OSX 10.5 and later was supported. On top of it all I was forced to deal with PPC vs. Intel architectures. WTF is this 1995???? (Remember all those cheaper non-Intel alternative processors back then, jeez can’t even remember their names and only AMD is left.)
Took about 3 hours to get my data backed up and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard. Also, since I had a Tiger machine I had to get the boxed set but I passed on installing iWork. OK three hours and $99 poorer I was ready to rock the laptop world!!!!!
So I started to put on my usual apps . . Text Wrangler, Taco Html, Firefox . . .Zim Wiki. Hmmmm Zim went on pretty roundabout on Tiger, a MacPort install.
I install the requisite XCode and X11 stuff off my Snow Leopard disk. Then, I install MacPorts. Only a little bit left. But it wasn’t going to be this easy, its a MAC and a MAC doesn’t like you messing with its libraries, let alone the .profile, in a nice manner.
So the instructions for Zim say install Python 2.5 and a few libraries and its on. Easy enough. But I get problems; problem problem problems. Packages can’t install. I search the MacPorts site, looking at bug databases and install config files. Apparantly someone uploaded on package dependency with only PPC architecture files; another Python library wouldn’t work on Snow Leopard’s 64-bit handling. And yet again a GTK package wouldn’t even work at ALL with Python 2.5 there and some were calling for Python 2.7 dependencies???
Tracing through the log files I go slow and try to use a few other installation methods. hand drop zim and python — nothing. I try Fink, which is kind of like a MacPorts — the Snow Leopard release doesn’t exist yet you have to build it by hand, if you have all the packages but I haven’t even gotten gcc working yet. The easy_install routine from Python doesn’t have everything I need “egged” up so that won’t work.
Wow great all these command-line installation methods: MacPorts, Fink, and Python got me nowhere on an OS released in June 2009. I learned a lot about python packages and how to use MacPorts though. Golly.
Finally, I issue this:
- sudo port -f uninstall installed
Trying to clean out all my MacPorts installs. At this point almost 6 hours have went by or researching, trial and error. I was sipping a Mountain Dew and having that stay-awake feeling I used to get looking for Windows 95 print drivers over 10 years ago to make something, ANYTHING work; or playing Champions RPG at 3 am.
Remembering a few things from the bug database and some package config files I try the install completely with Python 2.6, even though Zim hadn’t been built against that. Bingo it WORKED!!!! (I have a posting on this somewhere on this site).
9 total hours to put on a little app that takes 15 minutes to put on an XP or Linux box. As I’m watching the command line as MacPorts installs every goddamn thing under the stars just to make a tiny app work: perl, tcl, smalltalk, visualbasic 4, C from an old SCO Unix machine, informix, recipes for goulash. PERL??? WHY?!?!?!??! Dare I say — or question out loud — are Linux and Windows MORE compatable with each other due to the ease of classpathing?
Macintosh I just don’t get it.
Well have to go I need to write my Grandma an email about how easy it is to compile libpng on the supremely user-friendly OSX!!!!! She still uses mail -f . That silly Grandma!!!!!!
🙂