Just FYI, I bought a “new to me” 2015 MacBook Pro from my son’s friend and installed Gpredict on it. I use Gpredict to plan optical observing sessions (in the winter, I live on the Texas Gulf Coast in a swamp) but not to drive my observations. I used MacPorts and also installed X11/XQuartz - installation was pretty simple.
I load the CelesTrak orbits and also some others from the Observer community, so putting new orbits into Gpredict is easy, once you know how to do it.
There are ways that the application could work with the OS better, to control the size of controls, etc but it is quite usable.
I need to put Gpredict on my Macbook, but am a total novice at installing something like Gpredict on my own MacBook.I’ve gone to MacPort, and I see what looks like links to various OSX operating systems, but then I’m totally lost. Would you be able to provided a step-by-step guide for us dummies? Thanks in advance.
Sure! Once you know the secret it isn’t hard. Let’s try here and if needed we could take it to email and summarize back here.
First you need to install XCode (the default Macintosh Integrated Development Environment, even though you will not develop software for this effort). Do you know how to do that? If you OS is fairly up to date you can do that through the App Store. The MacPorts installation uses “developer tools” that come along with XCode.
Then go to XQuartz (https://www.xquartz.org/) and install XQuartz - this is another program that gives you a “Terminal” interface and I am not actually sure why you cant just use Terminal, but it does work. This is a package that you download and run an installer.
Now go to MacPorts and install that. Any questions about how? It sounds like you have looked at MacPorts before.
You could also use HomeBrew but do you want to learn about another port installer? Probably not.
Once all that is done, you open Terminal (or XQuartz) and type in an installation command. Let me know here if you are ready for that.
I hope it’s ok to keep this old thread alive. I have a new 16" MacBook Pro. So it has the M1 chip. I’m trying to get Gpredict running on it. I’ve done Xcode, XQuartz, and MacPorts. Predict took some work because Python is no longer bundled with OSX, has some other issues, but it seems to be installed and running. but the install, ./configure, make, make install all ran through to the end from what I can tell, but there are a whole bunch of functions that have been deprecated. I can’t get Gpredict to open without crashing.
The MacBook Pro that I have comes with the Intel i7 chip, could be a difference. When I have installed via MacPorts, every time the installation finishes with uncompleted dependencies, so I have learned to run install a couple of times. When it finishes installation you can just run install again until it has no failed dependency installations. Did you try something like that?
Charles
Does it matter what shell I am running the install from? (zsh or macport) Or the ./configure, make, make install commands? Which procedure did you repeat?