jbednar
commented
11 years ago | From: dclark87 | Date: Mar 2 12:52:05 2013 -0800 |
|---|---|
| Hi, I've been trying for a few weeks to get topographica | |
| successfully installed and happy on my mac running Mountain Lion, | |
| and I haven't been able to win. I've tried: |
Hi, and thanks for your interest! But I'm very sorry to hear that it has been so frustrating. Unfortunately, we don't currently have any Mac users working for us as developers, and so we have had to leave it up to the users to determine how to get the dependencies satisfied on Macs.
| - Using recommended pre-packaged scientific python distributions: | Anaconda CE and EPD Free. Anaconda CE doesn't seem to come with | Tkinter so topographica can't even start up with that.
Ok, thanks for letting us know. We'll remove Anaconda CE from the list of suitable distributions, if that's true.
| EPD Free was the one that worked the best, however after | verifying that I do have Tcl/Tk 8.5 on my machine and gmpy (via | pip install gmpy), there were still warnings how my Tcl/Tk | version was < 8.5 and gmpy.mpq couldnt be found. As a result, the | slower fixed point package was used.
Normally, FixedPoint should only slow things down by 15% or so, so gmpy's absence shouldn't be cause for alarm.
As for the others, one problem that Mac users always seem to be having with Python is that they end up with multiple copies of Python, Tk, and other important libraries, with the bits they need somehow always being installed in the wrong one. I don't know how to achieve getting them in the right one on any particular Mac, but that's usually seemed to be the key.
| The problem with this is that the GCAL tutorial crashes my | computer after 6 minutes because the package isn't optimized to | do floating point math without gmpy.mpq, evidently.
This sounds like something that we should investigate, because Python shouldn't be crashing your computer, ever, and it's extremely unusual that Topographica could even crash Python (certainly not something I've seen in years). We often run without gmpy, with no consequences like that, though it's true we haven't done so recently on a Mac. It would be great to get some sort of transcript or list of the messages that you have before the crash, if that's not lost when it goes down.
One of our students (CC:ed) has had a to-do list item of setting up Mac build slaves for the various Mac flavors for the past several months, but I don't think he's got to that yet. We do have a Mac dedicated to that purpose, but it's not running Mountain Lion (Snow Leopard, I think), so we have to get virtual machines running on it before we can test Mountain Lion or Lion. And unfortunately we have no Mac expert locally who knows how to get around the tangle of incompatible or partial Mac software distributions.
| - Homebrew and Macports, both have similar issues to above.
We definitely have never tried one of those options.
| Is there anyway I can just a step-by-step guide on how to install | topographica on the mac from a fresh Mountain Lion install? It's | really frustrating that I would love to take advantage of this | software package for my neuroscience research, but I can't just | because of stupid install dependencies and complier issues with the | OS.
We would love to have a contribution of such a guide, along with someone to keep it up to date, but so far even the Mac users we did have as developers have gotten so frustrated with trying to do their scientific computation on a Mac that they gave up and just logged in to a Linux machine remotely (so far, four out of four Mac users over six years!). The problems they had weren't to do with Topographica per se, just that they ended up having various problems with dependencies over time, and also wanted to be able to run large jobs on batch machines (which all run Linux anyway), so it wasn't worth the effort to them to track down the little niggling problems that made things tricky on their Mac laptops. We were hoping that the new Mac scientific Python distributions would solve this issue, but it sure sounds like they have not! :-(
Jim
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
pintohutch
ceball
Hi, I've been trying for a few weeks to get topographica successfully installed and happy on my mac running Mountain Lion, and I haven't been able to win. I've tried:
Is there anyway I can just a step-by-step guide on how to install topographica on the mac from a fresh Mountain Lion install? It's really frustrating that I would love to take advantage of this software package for my neuroscience research, but I can't just because of stupid install dependencies and complier issues with the OS.