HEP on X

Now 10.4 page is availale. 10.4 users should go there.

This page contains installation records of software packages for High Energy Physics (HEP) computing on MacOS X 10.3. The software packages I installed into my MacOS X box are available as either RPMs or Tar Balls.  Note that the ppc subdirectory contains architecture-dependent binaries while the noarch subdirectory contains architecture-independent ones. If you want to build them for yourself, you can get original source files and my private patches as SRPMs or from Ported Source Packages for MacOS X directory which is the place where you may want to look into,when a SRPM only contains a SPEC file describing file contents. MacOS X specifiic patches are in SOURCES and SPEC files are in SPECS.

For setting up the RPM (Redhat Package Manager) on your platform, first read this.

These packages have been tested on my machine (PowerBook G4) but may not work on your platform. Install them thus at your own risk. For more information, follow the links below.

Some Tips Before We Begin

It is a good idea to use gnutar instead of the system's default tar in most cases. In my case tar is aliased to /usr/bin/gnutar: the system standard tar overwrites directories by default and may screw up symbolic links or directories permissions.
Notice also that HFS+ is a case-insensitive file system, so readme and README are the same. If a tarball contains readme and README, one of them will thus be lost when expanded: this happens whatever "tar" command (including gnutar) you use. Be careful not to overwrite existing files: I had a bad experience.

MacOS X Release 10.2.X binaries seem to work on 10.3 as they are, though I have rebuilt most packages on 10.3 in order to test stability of the new developer tools based on gcc3.3. Nevertheless, I would recommend you to use the new binaries rebuilt on 10.3, since I have no plan to maintain10.2 packages in the future.