I've decided to try and use BRL-CAD on my Mac OS X (Snow Leopard). I've downloaded and installed 7.12.2. I can't really find it anywhere, though. :) I went into Terminal and poked around and found it under /usr/brlcad, but:
a. No desktop icon anywhere to start
b. Nothing found under Applications in Spotlight
c. No .profile anywhere (cd $HOME; find . -name .profile) to set path
d. Don't know how to set PATH on my machine
Any help getting pointed in the right direction would be fantastic - thanks!
Also: Are MGED and Archer still part of the Mac version of BRL-CAD?
Thanks,
Mike
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BRL-CAD still installs like an X11 or UNIX application, even on Mac OS X. So you'd normally have to run BRL-CAD from the command line like other command-line applications. Since you're not familiar with using the command line, setting your path, etc, you'll have a bit of an uphill battle / learning curve ahead of you in order to be productive.
What you can do, though, is run Terminal, then type "open /usr" without quotes on the command line. That should pop up a Finder window where you can traverse into a folder named "brlcad" and in there another folder named "bin". There might be an intermediate rel-7.12.2 folder as well.
There are hundreds of applications in BRL-CAD, but that 'bin' folder should have one named 'mged' and another named 'archer'. I suspect that will be insufficient, though. The 7.12.2 Mac binary release is *ancient* so unless you have an old PPC mac, it's probably not going to work for you anyways.
The only two realistic options you have are to either wait for an updated Mac binary release or compile from a source distribution (the compilation/installation steps are ridiculously crazy-simple).
Cheers!
Sean
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Greetings,
I've decided to try and use BRL-CAD on my Mac OS X (Snow Leopard). I've downloaded and installed 7.12.2. I can't really find it anywhere, though. :) I went into Terminal and poked around and found it under /usr/brlcad, but:
a. No desktop icon anywhere to start
b. Nothing found under Applications in Spotlight
c. No .profile anywhere (cd $HOME; find . -name .profile) to set path
d. Don't know how to set PATH on my machine
Any help getting pointed in the right direction would be fantastic - thanks!
Also: Are MGED and Archer still part of the Mac version of BRL-CAD?
Thanks,
Mike
P.S. I *had* a title to my thread…
BRL-CAD still installs like an X11 or UNIX application, even on Mac OS X. So you'd normally have to run BRL-CAD from the command line like other command-line applications. Since you're not familiar with using the command line, setting your path, etc, you'll have a bit of an uphill battle / learning curve ahead of you in order to be productive.
What you can do, though, is run Terminal, then type "open /usr" without quotes on the command line. That should pop up a Finder window where you can traverse into a folder named "brlcad" and in there another folder named "bin". There might be an intermediate rel-7.12.2 folder as well.
There are hundreds of applications in BRL-CAD, but that 'bin' folder should have one named 'mged' and another named 'archer'. I suspect that will be insufficient, though. The 7.12.2 Mac binary release is *ancient* so unless you have an old PPC mac, it's probably not going to work for you anyways.
The only two realistic options you have are to either wait for an updated Mac binary release or compile from a source distribution (the compilation/installation steps are ridiculously crazy-simple).
Cheers!
Sean