Category Archives: Computers

Developer, Free Stuff, Macs, Programming, Software

SVN 1.7 for Mac OS Lion

Mac OS Lion comes with SVN 1.6 installed by default. But I needed to install SVN 1.7 to work on a project that uses SVN1.7.

Here is what I did to come trough:

I like using the SVN GUI tool svnX. The current version of the program is: svnX 1.3.3 (http://code.google.com/p/svnx/wiki/Features_1_3). Take a look and download it if you like what you see. It’s free and after you learn how to use it you will love it!. Download here.

The latest version of subversion is 1.7.5 (as today) and it can be found in
http://apache.is.co.za/subversion/

But svnX 1.3.3 is compatible with svn 1.7.4 so we are going to install that rather that the latest svn (1.7.5). Also I because I found some problems with svn 1.7.5.

1) Create a folder where you will put the svn 1.7.4 files. Download and extract the source.

$mkdir ~/Downloads/svn
$cd ~/Downloads/svn
$curl http://archive.apache.org/dist/subversion/subversion-1.7.4.tar.gz > ./subversion-1.7.4.tar.gz
$tar -xvjf subversion-1.7.4.tar.bz2  //to uncompress a bzip2 tar file: .tbz or .tar.bz2
$cd subversion-1.7.4

Configuration setup, Building and install the binary

$./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$make
$sudo make install

It should now be installed in /usr/local/bin/svn. Check if it got correctly installed.

$/usr/local/bin/svn --version

Notes:

  • You may try to install version 1.7.5 at your risk. Replace ‘subversion-1.7.5.tar.bz2’ with the latest version you find in the above link on the ‘curl’ command.
  • You can also install the latest version of subversion using MacPorts

Resources:

Macs, Open Source Software, Programming, Python

Python, VPython and Enthought

For those who are starting to work with Python this may be useful.

I have been trying to use VPython for a while with the Enthought distro to develop Python software. (I’m using 32 bit Python 2.7 Enthought distro for Mac OSX 10.6.8).

But for some reason the VPython package will not be installed if the Python distribution in your mac is not the official one (e.g. oficial Python 2.7 installed in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7)

The Enthought distro installs itself in

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current

as a symbolic link to

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/7.2

Which is not right for VPython because it expects the default link to be ‘2.7’.

Ok, what I did was to delete the official 2.7 Python distro and create a symbolic link ‘2.7’ to the ‘7.2’ EDP version. And it works great!

To create the symbolic link just open the terminal and do:
>> cd /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions
>> sudo ln -s 7.2 2.7

Now open Python:
>> python

and type
from visual import *
sphere()

you should see a sphere draw like this:

Now Python works well with Enthought.

References
http://vpython.org/
http://www.enthought.com/

1-Ground, Computers, Open Source Software, Software

LibreOffice Visio Importer coming up

Many people are switching from Windows to Linux and Macs. The more people do this migration, the more everyone realizes that there is a big need to create tools that reutilize old Microsoft Windows files… like Visio files. When I learned that people are working on a LibreOffice Visio importer I had a ding in my head. This is AWESOME! I’ll be able to see my old visio files and actually reutilize them without having to go on a Windows computer. Yeah!

Fridrich Strba in one of the developers of this great tool. He says: “For those that have big piles of Visio documents on their disks, but cannot read on their favourite Linux distribution: Your pain is coming to an end. The LibreOffice Visio Import filter will be part of LibreOffice 3.5 release, which will be the next major release early next year.” That is, 2012. So it’s coming up really soon.

He also adds that if people want to try this feature we can download the LibreOffice 3.5 daily builds from here: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/

Opensource is changing the way we use computers! For the best 🙂

By the way, I’m using LibreOffice  for only a week now and it’s just great. I hope it will come to a point I don’t need to use any other software for documentation or presentations or spreadsheets or drawing or… ok, I’ll just say that it’s a great tool already and is very promising. You should download it and give it a try! http://www.libreoffice.org/

References