Mac OX X Support (Preliminary)

The initial port to Apple OS X release 10.3 (Panther) is now available for evaluation. Distributions are available from the Darwin link in the Binary Distribution repository.

These are initial test distributions, and feedback is very important. Temporary licenses are available to anyone wishing to try the software. Please send the machine's host name and IP address, as per instructions here (scroll down to "How to Get a Demo").

It is well known that OS X is built using the core of FreeBSD. Lurking beneath the pretty graphics is a skeletal Unix-like operating system, including support for X-Windows. Most of the open-source software developed for Linux/FreeBSD has been ported to OS X, so for the Unix fans (like me), the operating system can look like Unix with a way-cool graphical interface that also runs Macintosh applications. Overall, OS X is very impressive for a desktop operating system.

However, the shared-library support in OS X 10.3 is a disappointment. This subsystem is a legacy of the Next project, and unfortunately does not provide the full support needed for some Unix applications, including ours. Porting of Unix applications to OS X is at minimum made unnecessarily difficult. We hope and expect that as OS X matures, this defect will be remedied.

The implications on our ports are as follows:

1. Xic and WRspice use the system memory allocator, and not the built-in memory allocator. This means that memory usage statistics are not as readily available, built-in memory diagnostics are not available, error checking and recording are not as complete, and the performance for extremely large data sets is unknown. In general use, this should not be visible to the user, however.

2. The WRspice device library is linked as a static library to the WRspice binary, and not provided as a separate dynamic library. The device library has been kept as a separate entity to provide the option for users to custom-build their own libraries, though throughout the history of this product no customer has expressed interest in making use of this facility. Thus, not having a separate shared device library is not expected to be of concern to customers.

The programs are installed by default under /usr/local, and it is highly recommended that this default be chosen. In order for the install to be successful, the user must have write permission to this location. That means that the user must have root permission.

If a root password has been defined, the user can use "su" to become root as in Unix/Linux. Users from a Unix background will want to define a root password to avoid going nuts (see your Apple docs for instructions).

Otherwise, there is a "sudo" command that can be issued which provides temporary root privileges to certain pre-designated users. From a command line, one can use sudo to execute commands that require root privileges. The user is asked for their password, and the command is executed if the password is accepted.

The sudo command is built into the wr_install and wr_update scripts, so that users should not need to become root explicitly to perform updates. To edit configuration files in the installation, root access is needed. The sudo command can be used to start the license server.

Thus, upgrades will always directly overwrite an existing installation; it is not cleared first as under Unix/Linux. This should not be a problem, though.