neverendingbooks

hold on to those PPC macs

On my return from O a brand new 15inch MacBook Pro lie waiting in my office. By that evening I had wrecked the system to the extend that I could no longer login and had to reinstall from scratch… I was about to trow it away but tried it out for a few more days and eventually began to understand it a bit. In short : the new Intel Macs promise to be really good hardware, unfortunately some essential software lags behind, so if you want a stress-free Mac-life… hold on to your PPC mac a few months longer. If you are impatient and want to learn some of the pitfalls, read on… I’m ashamed to admit this but the first thing I did on my new machine was to create a WindowsXP partition… BootCamp does what it promises to do and is extremely easy to use once you can start it. The installation guide does tell that you jave to update your systems software and firmware, but that’s what you do anyway after a new install, right? Wrong! You update the software but not the firmware and it took me some time to come to this simple conclusion. How to check whether your firmware is up to date? Go under the apple to ‘About this Mac’, click on ‘More Info’ and look at your ‘ Boot ROM Version:’ if it says MBP11.0055.B03 you’re ok, if not you have to install the newest firmware which is a slightly terrifying experience with soundsignals included, but works fine. Once this is done, you can start BootCamp and have a Windows partition in no time. At a certain moment you have to decide on possible partition-formats for the Windows part, I choose the ‘Fat’ option to be able to swap files across the partitions. Next, what does a mathematician wants from a computer? To run LaTeX! I’ve installed LaTeX on more Macs than I remember so I continued on automatic pilot, getting Gerben Wierda’s i-Installer, startd it up and … my machine froze! Nothing, not even a ‘Force Quit’, was possible any more. Today, there is a clear warning message as the i-Installer page (i don’t recall seeing it there last week, but then it is a recent problem. Things broke down on May 11th when I was still in O)

WARNING: i-Installer on Mac OS X 10.4.6 may trigger the Mac OS X 10.4.6 bug that partially freezes your system. May 2006: i-Installer did work perfectly on Mac OS X 10.4.3, the version of Tiger that was shipped with the Developer Transition Kit. When the first intel machines were sold by Apple, these contained 10.4.4 and on that system, i-Installer experiences troubles because of problems deep inside Apple’s Frameworks. The only way I could solve this was to make i-Installer a PowerPC-only application again and ask for Apple’s help to determine where the problem was. So far, this has been s slow process without any noticeable results. The PowerPC-only version worked fine until Apple released 10.4.6 and especially the latest upgrades (Security Upgrade 2006-003 and maybe QuickTime). As I am writing this (May 21) a completely updated Mac OS X 10.4.6 on intel will partially freeze in various circumstances, triggered by various applications (MatLab, i-Installer, etc.). Sadly, the just released MacBook (successor of the iBook) is shipping with this broken version of the OS. Hence, there is now no i-Installer that reliably works on intel machines with recent OS versions and even worse, i-Installer may trigger a nasty bug in recent Mac OS X intel versions.

Scary isn’t it? You have a brand new expensive machine but cannot typeset a single paper… Fortunately, the TeXShop page not only mentions the problem, but also a workaround

On May 11, 2006, Apple provided security updates for Mac OS X. These updates broke i-Installer on Intel (it continues to work on PowerPC). If you have an Intel Mac and you have installed this update, you must use the MacTeX install package until this problem is fixed. Once TeX is installed, it works fine.

The first assertion is true : installing the MacTeX package gives you a working TeX-installation, with TeXShop, Excalibur, BibTeX and i-Installer coming for free. But don’t think the i-Installer problem has been solved, I tried it out and voila another ice-age… So far so good but sometimes we like to compute things, don’t we? Like some commutative algebra or algebraic geometry things via Singular? I remembered to install this via the Fink project but already their news-items are not very promissing

A preliminary version of Fink for the Intel architecture is now ready. No binary packages are available, and things are still rough around the edges, but it should be usable if you are patient! To install it, you need to install the XCode compiler and SDK packages (at minimum). Then you need to get the file fink-0.24.14.tar.gz from the Sourceforge file release page for Fink, expand the file, and run the command ./bootstrap.sh . At the end of the bootstrap process, run fink selfupdate and you’ll get the currently available packages. At last check, there were about 1750 packages in the “stable” tree, but about 150 of those did not build. When things are truly stable, another annoucement will be made here.

The normal FinkCommander didn’t work either but then I found a version which does at Charles K. C. Lo’s Homepage. I verified it by having the fink-TeTeX package installed (which works!) and then I wanted to do a Singular-install… Things seemed to start off well (once you change the freferences to install also unstable packages) but then the installation procedure halted with the message

Failed: phase compiling: singular-3.0.1-1013 failed Before reporting any errors, please run “fink selfupdate” and try again. If you continue to have issues, please check to see if the FAQ on fink’s website solves the problem. If not, ask on the fink-users or fink-beginners mailing lists. As a last resort, you can try e-mailing the maintainer directly: Michael Brickenstein bricken at mathematik.uni-kl.de Note that many fink package maintainers do not (yet) have access to OS X on Intel hardware, so you may have better luck on the mailing lists.

So, maybe I should just donate my MacBook Pro to the Fink-project? A similar problem with installing Maxima… I didn’t even try out GAP via Fink but went for a niversal Unix-installation for GAP and this WORKED! even with all packages and tables and the whole I dont know what. Thank you, GAPpers, perhaps all algebraists on Intel Macs should shift to GroupTheory? But hey! My Intel-Mac does have a WindowsXP partition… So, I did a binary Windows install of Singular and Maxima and both work without problems. Still, it is a strange situation. Fortunately, I did resolve these issues but that will have to wait until tomorrow…