On all platforms, if you do not have swig version 1.1 build 883 installed, you will need to provide the --skip-swig argument to the build command, and will also need to build and install in one step, like this:

python setup.py build --skip-swig [other build args] install [install args]

Also, before version 2.0.beta8, the python setup.py clean command would delete the swig output files. If you don't have swig 1.1 build 883, you'll have to extract these files from the distributed tar file in order to restore them.

The tricky part of installing oof2 on OS X can be getting the requisite third party libraries. Generally, it's easy to do this using a package manager, such as fink. Our experience with fink and OS X 10.4 is that most everything works smoothly, but there are a few points to be careful about.

Because we're familiar with fink and not with other Macintosh package managers, these notes are very fink-centric. That's not meant to disparage the other package managers in any way, nor is it any kind of official endorsement of fink.

• Before you do anything else, make sure that you have installed Apple's X11, which comes in two optional packages on the system disks: X11User.pkg and X11SDK.pkg. In principle, it's possible to use other X11 implementations, such as xfree86 from fink, but we don't have any experience with them and find that Apple's X11 works well.
• If you use fink to download and install python packages, it's convenient to use fink's python, rather than the python that comes as part of OS X. So install python (version 2.3 or later) along with the other required packages described in the README file.
• OOF2's setup.py script will use the compilers that were used to build python. It's sometimes important that all C++ components of a program be built by the same compiler. In particular, it's not good to mix g++ 3.3 and g++ 4.0.
  • If you're using OS X 10.4 or later, make sure you're using fink 0.81 or later. Then everything will use gcc/g++ 4.0, and you don't have to worry.
  • If you're using OS X 10.4 and an earlier version of fink, then you'll have to use gcc_select to set the compiler version to 3.3, and don't use fink to install ImageMagick. Fink will use the wrong compiler. See the note below about installing ImageMagick.
  • If you're using OS X 10.3 or earlier, you'll also probably have to install ImageMagick from source code. See below.

No special treatment seems to be necessary in order to install oof2 on Intel-based Macs. Just make sure you're using the right version of fink.

Installing ImageMagick on a Mac.

Some combinations of OS X and fink will require you to build ImageMagick by hand, because otherwise you'll end up with ImageMagick libraries compiled with g++ 4.0 and oof2 code compiled with g++ 3.3, which will cause the program to crash, or even fail to load. Download the ImageMagick source code from http://www.imagemagick.org, and build it using its configure and make scripts. Some of the libraries that ImageMagick uses can be obtained from fink. If you do want to link to the fink libraries, configure ImageMagick like this:

configure LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib CPPFLAGS=-I/sw/include

Building SWIG 1.1 on a Mac

The only obstacle to installing swig 1.1 build 883 on a Mac is that the Mac's file system is not case sensitive, and swig's build procedure tries to make a subdirectory named SWIG and a file named swig in the same directory. You can install swig on a case-insensitive disk, you just can't build it there. There are at least three ways to get around this inconvenience:

• Build swig on a disk with a different type of file system. Format the disk with the Unix File System, using Apple's Disk Utility application.
• Use Disk Utility to create a disk image, formatted with the Unix File System. After you open the disk image, it will act just like a real disk, and you can use it to build swig.
• Hack the swig source files so that it doesn't have a case problem. If you don't mind a second hand swig, you can download our modified version here:
  • swig1.1-88-mac.tar.gz