Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Spring Semester, 2007
6.081: Introduction to EECS 1

Installing the software on Macs

Note: although Python 2.3 comes pre-installed on Mac OS X, for this class we will be using Python 2.4.

A. Install Python

There are assorted Python packages available based on what version of OS X you are using. All of them are available for download on this page; please find the appropriate installer for your version of OS X, download it, and run the installer.

For most of you (running OS 10.3.9 or later), it will be Python 2.4.4 Universal Binary

B. Installing additional Python packages

You will also need to install Numeric, a package that will be used in later labs. This file is available in two versions: for OS X 10.3, and for OS X 10.4 and later

C. Install and run the SoaR software

If you have the Terminal program open now, close it and restart it. Otherwise, the old version of Python will be used by default and cause trouble downstream.

Download and unpack the latest version of SoaR and unpack it to an easy-to-find directory (say, your desktop). To run SoaR, simply open up a terminal and type: 

cd Desktop/SoaR
sudo python setup.py install

Note that if you unpacked to anywhere other than your desktop, you should navigate there instead.

It is likely that you'll get an error message that starts like this 

     SoaR.App.alert("If you would prefer to use vi/emacs over IDLE,
      uncomment and recomment the lines that look like EDITOR_COMMAND=...
at the end of this install process. That's because they had to do a workaround to make it smooth for the Windows people. It won't affect the installation process, so just ignore it. You're cooler anyway :-)

To run SoaR, simply type the following at the terminal: 

pythonw -c  "import SoaR;SoaR.run()"
To avoid having to do this in the future, you can create an alias. Open the file .bashrc in your home directory, or create it if it doesn't exist. Add the following line: 
alias SoaR='python -c "import SoaR;SoaR.run()"'
Now you can start SoaR simply by simply typing 'SoaR' (sans quotes) in a terminal window.