[daip] Mac aips

[Eric Greisen]

Lawrence Rudnick wrote:
>   Hi Eric -
> 
> Just got a Mac for first time in 20 years and am installing AIPS.  Went 
> pretty smoothly.  Several problems that perhaps you can help out with.  
> The only show stopper is number 2.
> 
> 1. I didn't have a .profile set up, so I went to root area, ran 
> LOGIN.SH, but somehow "aips" isn't defined ( I don't remember where 
> that's supposed to get defined).  So I simply executed the command below 
> and started up fine.

In bash you do a . LOGIN.SH (not the dot) and in tcsh you do a
  source LOGIN.CSH.  The $PATH should then contain your $SYSLOCAL which 
should contain a pointer to $AIPS_ROOT/START_AIPS called aips.

> 
> 2. TV is a problem, see error message below.  I'm running an external 
> display and laptop display (mirrored).

The text from the AIPS Manager FAQ page on our web site says:
> 
  Shared memory id failure: Invalid Argument

     If you see this on a Mac, congratulations; you have one of the 
larger display screens. The default Mac system limits shared memory 
pages to 4 Mbytes. When XAS starts it tells you that it is making a 
screen x pixels by y pixels. The memory you will need is at least 4 x y 
bytes. For the new large screens this is more than 8 Mbytes. On 10.3 and 
10.4 systems, you can change this limit by changing (as root or admin) 
the rc file in /etc, adjusting the kern.sysv.shm* line to

              #Setting the shared memory to something a bit more reasonable.
                 sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=10485760
                 sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmin=1
                 sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmni=32
                 sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmseg=8
                 sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmall=4096


     If you are really lucky and have a 30-inch screen (2550 by 1500 
pixels) then you will have to make the shmmax line even larger

                 sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=16777216

  On the latest "leopard" systems, /etc/rc is gone and creating it will 
have no effect. You need to create an /etc/sysctl.conf file and put the 
values in it,

             kern.sysv.shmmax=10485760
             kern.sysv.shmmin=1
             kern.sysv.shmmni=32
             kern.sysv.shmseg=8
             kern.sysv.shmall=4096


You should use the values you had when you were running tiger. Those 
could be in /Previous\ System/etc/rc, assuming you have "Previous 
System". So three different OS upgrades and three different ways to 
adjust the default shared memory. Note: You will need to reboot the 
system for the change in shared memory to take place. You can check if 
the shared memory changes happened by typing "sysctl kern.sysv" in a 
terminal or xterm window. Look for the kern.sysv.shm* values. If the 
values have not changed, make sure you haven't inadvertently left in 
"sysctl -w" in the /etc/sysctl.conf file or mis-typed one of the values. 
If the /etc/sysctl.conf file is not properly formatted, or shmmax is not 
an integer multiple of shmall, the shared memory will not be adjusted 
after the reboot.


> 3. TPMON had problems. I have no tape drives. All I want is ability to 
> read/write FITS area. That is working fine, so I could just ignore the 
> TPMON messages.
>  I did not edit the /etc/services file because I was going to be using 
> local.  At the bottom, I list the default (current) /etc/services 
> entries in the

You could add one line for the TPMON or ignore the messages since you do 
not plan to use it.

>

Sorry for the delay in answering - I have been away on vacation.

Eric Greisen