LEGO Mindstorms Fantom Drivers Mac Install Script

A script to install the LEGO Mindstorms Fantom drivers on semi-modern macOS versions (through macOS 10.14 Mojave).

Since macOS 10.15 Catalina dropped support for 32-bit, installing on newer versions of macOS is pointless.

Overview

The trouble with the native installer package, is that the installer tries to install a legacy codeless kernel extension named Fantom.kext. There are several problems with this.

• Fantom.kext depends on the legacy 32-bit com.apple.kernel.iokit which has not shipped with macOS for some time.
• Fantom.kext has no code signature, so it cannot be loaded on 10.10+ without disabling security features.
• The installer attempts to install to /System/Library/Extensions/Fantom.kext, which is a directory protected by System Integrity Protection, or SIP, so it fails to even install on 10.11+ without SIP being disabled.
• It also installs an unnecessary StartupItems to try to load the kernel extension, which is useless since it cannot be loaded anyway.

Ultimately, this kernel extension appears to be completely unnecessary, as nothing actually appears to fail without it. The other parts of the driver are however needed to communicate with the Mindstorms brick.

• /Library/Application Support/National Instruments
• /Library/Frameworks/Fantom.framework
• /Library/Frameworks/VISA.framework
• /Library/Preferences/NIvisa

This script will manually install only the necessary files from the official PKG installer, preserving the correct permissions, and ignoring the useless files.

Usage

1. Download the legodriverinstaller.sh script.
2. Obtain the official PKG installer file.
3. Open a terminal to the directory of the legodriverinstaller.sh script.
4. Give the script executable permissions so it can be run.

   chmod +x ./legodriverinstaller.sh

5. Run the script, passing the path to the PKG installer.

   sudo ./legodriverinstaller.sh 'MAC legodriver.pkg'

6. Profit.

License

Copyright (c) 2017 JrMasterModelBuilder

Licensed under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0.