It’s Yosemite day

Yep, finally, not wanting to upgrade because it’ll officially break all of my code on my laptop I think I’ve finally offloaded all of the essential work to my production servers. Which means that today is upgrade day…

 

What follows below is more-or-less the step-by-step process that I used to install Yosemite. So it’s going to be mostly a “upgrade from an astronomer” prospective.

Install Yosemite

Okay, so while this 5 GB download is going I can keep working on my machine and prep for things. I’ve already gotten a backup of everything important off of my machine, so I don’t need to worry about this today.

One big thing here is to go clean house. I’ve got (several) old builds of the high energy astrophysics framework installed on my machine. These are officially useless (many of them go back a couple of years but they’re ones that I kept around for debugging new code). Trashed.

Update during install: And now we wait…it turns out that the Yosemite installer doesn’t like it when you have a ton of things in /usr/local/bin (which of course, I do). So there’s a long wait as it copies everything over to a “Recovered” drive and then (presumably) back into /usr/local/bin. I’ll have to check and see what happened to everything in there. I was already planning on rebuilding everything against the new Yosemite kernel, but maybe it looks like I should have cleaned out /usr/local before running the installer…

Upgrade XCode

Man, I’d been living in the past…the new Xcode sure is pretty…now if only I actually worked in a set of programming languages where I could take advantage of it. Maybe one day if/when I ever move myself fully over to Python.

Make sure that the developer command line tools are installed and up-to-date:

xcode-select –install

Update XQuartz

Trusty old X11, which since OSX Mavericks (ish?) is no longer “officially” part of the OSX developer tools.

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

Update Brews

I use homebrew to manage things (like my gcc compilers). So “brew update” it is…and then “brew upgrade”

Install ds9

Okay, so the ds9 webpage claims that the binary is only good up to 10.9, but it lies. Things work just fine on 10.10.

Update astropy from github.

Which I hadn’t done in forever.

Download HeaSoft and rebuild

And here’s where things always go off the rails. It turned out that when I first went to Mavericks the XQuartz install that I had didn’t put links to itself in /usr/X11 (which is where X11 used to live before XQuartz was split off into its own development team a few years ago). The new version does put its own symlinks there (to /opt/X11), but I’d still been passing the Heasoft configuration sripts some compiler flags as a workaround. This (for some reason) was causing perl to crash while building a Makefile. The flags are gone, and things are back to normal.

Unfortunately the latest heasoft code release doesn’t include the latest XSpec patches, so one must do this separately.

 

Then, you’re done! Start-to-finish time (I was working on my Linux servers at work for most of this) was starting on Thursday afternoon and finishing on Monday morning (after I figured out the heasarc compiler issues). Poking around, things feel pretty normal. It’ll take me some time to get used to the Yosemite icons and design langauge, but I think in general it’s pretty good. I think I still have a TeX update to install…so there may be an update to this post in a few hours.

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