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Randall C. O'Reilly edited this page Mar 16, 2021 · 1 revision

Mac Install

  • Navigate to the relevant release on the main repository page, under Releases (standard numerical ordering -- latest version is highest): https://github.com/emer/cemer/releases/

  • If you haven't installed emergent previously, or have an older version, download the emergent_install_mac_deps-V.V.V.dmg file where V.V.V is a version number (which may be different than the release itself -- the dependencies change less frequently), and double-click to install that. These are the toolkits etc upon which cemer depends.

  • Then download the emergent-V.V.V-##-mac64.dmg file, where again V.V.V is a version number and ## is a svn version number (only on older versions), and double-click on it to install.

  • Optionally, for version 8.x and above, there may be an LTS-Version-7, which will be emergent-7.1.0-##-mac64.dmg where the ## number matches the corresponding number from the main 8.x version, which must be installed first -- the 7.1.0 version depends on it!

  • The app installs into Applications just like regular mac apps -- navigate there and double-click on the icon to run it (it is called emergent or emergent7)

Opening unsigned packages

Hold down the control key when you click on the package file, then select Open from the popup menu, and then click on the Open option. If you don't do this, you get an opaque message about the package not being trusted.

Troubleshooting

Dependency Installer Script Issues

There are various issues that can arise from the emergent_install_mac_deps script:

  • You need to enter your password in the terminal that opens when you run it! You need to click in the terminal window after Password: and then type in the same password that you use when you login to your Mac after a restart. This is necessary to engage "root" or "superuser" permissions, which is required for installing the dependencies -- furthermore, your account on the computer must have Administrator permissions. You can check this by going to Users & Groups in System Preferences and seeing if you have Admin after the Current user account name. Google this if you don't know what this means, or if you get an error message like this:
'username' is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

As of version 8.5 the script relies extensively on Homebrew for installing dependencies -- carefully look at the terminal window output to see if there are errors at the end of the process -- unfortunately it outputs a lot of stuff and it does multiple passes to attempt to overcome various issues that might arise. One possible error:

  • Some /usr/local subdirectories need to be owned by user for brew link to work -- this indicates the same sudo / Administrator issue per above.

Library not loaded errors

If emergent doesn't run when you click on it in Applications, try to run from Terminal.app, so you can see the error message:

$ /usr/local/bin/emergent

If you get this kind of error:

dyld: Library not loaded: @rpath/QtOpenGL.framework/Versions/5/QtOpenGL
  Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/emergent
  Reason: image not found
Abort trap: 6

Then the Qt package did not install properly -- the most common cause of this is that the full Qt package failed to download properly (it is big) -- you can just manually re-download the package from the 8.5.1 release as qt5931_mac64.dmg (or https://grey.colorado.edu/emergent_ftp/ if it is up). Then just open that package and install it like you would any such package. Then try re-running emergent per above. The other package that might have failed to install is coin: e.g., coin_mac64_4_0.dmg

Permissions

If emergent seems to have installed correctly, but you are unable to run it, the problem could be a permissions issue. Possible symptoms are:

  • Getting an error message such as You can't open the application emergent.app because it may be damaged or incomplete

  • A stop sign on top of software icon, which typically indicates it's not for this version of OS X,

  • Getting this kind of response when trying to run emergent from the terminal:

$ emergent
-bash: emergent: command not found
$ which emergent
$ ls /usr/local/bin
ls: bin: Permission denied

This might happen if your account is not an administrator account. To fix, do this:

$ cd /usr/local
$ sudo chmod -R +rX bin   # Case sensitive!!

Wrong package

If you get an error such as this:

$ emergent
dyld: Library not loaded: Inventor.framework/Versions/C/Inventor
  Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/emergent
  Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap

The problem might be that you need to run the emergent_install_deps script to get the relevant dependencies.

Path

If you can't start emergent from a Terminal window by typing emergent, it is probably because /usr/local/bin is not in your path. To check:

$ echo $PATH
/sw/bin:/sw/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
$ cat /etc/paths
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/usr/local/bin

If you don't see it when you type those commands, add it:

$ sudo bash -c 'echo /usr/local/bin >> /etc/paths'

Then restart your Terminal and emergent should be accessible from the command line. This will also allow you to compile plugins from within emergent, since maketa is also located in /usr/local/bin.

Alternative Installs

Build-Mac-Homebrew -- uses the homebrew packaging system to handle all the dependency libraries. As of version 8.5 we now do this for all but Qt and Coin.

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