[phenixbb] 64-bit Snow Leopard support

Nathaniel Echols nechols at lbl.gov
Wed Sep 15 10:30:19 PDT 2010


Mac users--

The latest nightly version of Phenix (dev-532) is now capable of
compiling 64-bit objects on Snow Leopard, which should help those of
you working on very large and/or high-resolution structures.  You will
need to use the source installer for this; it will automatically
recognize the machine type as "mac-intel-osx-x86_64" and use the
correct sources.  There are several things to be aware of before
trying this:

1. I had to switch to the development version of wxPython to get the
GUI working, and it's both inherently less stable and based on
fundamentally different OS libraries, which may cause problems.  I've
fixed some of the most obvious issues and everything appears to run
now, but I expect to find more glitches.  (This shouldn't affect
command-line users.)

2. We haven't extensively tested 64-bit Phenix on Mac; there may be
undiagnosed low-level bugs, even for command-line-only use.  This
should change soon.

3. For the above reasons, and because source installation is generally
difficult to support, we recommend that you continue to use the 32-bit
binary installer if you are not experiencing memory problems.  (It
will figure out what you are trying to do and correct the machine type
accordingly.)

4. One side effect of this change is that an installation made on
Leopard will not work on Snow Leopard, and vice-versa.  I may be able
to fix this.

Hopefully there will be a binary installer in the near future, if I
can ever figure out how to fix NFS on my workstation.

-Nat



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