As I mentioned previously, I have a Mac Mini at home as a workstation. While some things are easier working with it, like video editing, and basic office productivity, some things are harder.

One of the harder areas on OS X is customizing the Unix side of it for my development environment on Linux. I work primarily with Python, which does ship with Mountain Lion (Python 2.7), but it doesn't have everything. For example, the incredibly useful virtualenv was something that I had to add on later, and many things I pulled from the Homebrew project, which has been incredibly useful to a Linux geek like me.

I currently have a strong need to profile my work, and there's no substitute to the impressive work of RunSnakeRun. RunSnakeRun requires wxPython, which requires wxGtk, which requires wxWindows, etc, etc. One simple way to get wxPython on Mac is Homebrew, where it's called wxMac:

brew install wxmac

That works just fine, although it does not, at present, update the PYTHONPATH to include it. I found this was required to put it into the path:

sudo cat /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages > \ /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/wx.pth

At which point, you should be able to "import wx" in python, and it should work. Now, RunSnakeRun can be easily installed in a virtualenv, like so:

mkvirtualenv snake pip install SquareMap RunSnakeRun

The problem is that wx requires permission to access the display on the Mac. I don't know the details of this, but Robin Dunn of wxPython fame goes into the issue here, with a solution. His solution is a bit old, and I'm running Mountain Lion, so I adapted it a bit.

The python executable is simply /usr/bin/python, so I just did this:

(snake)msoulier@merlin:~/envs/snake$ cat ~/envs/snake/bin/runwx #!/bin/bash PYVER=2.7 PYTHON=/usr/bin/python ENV=$HOME/envs/snake export PYTHONHOME=$ENV exec $PYTHON "$@"

Now, the silly indirection of easy_install makes this a little tougher. You can't just run the runsnake script with this wrapper, as it apparently invokes the actual runsnake.py script in some indirect manner that results in losing desired environment we're trying to establish here. If I understood what easy_install was doing better, I could likely hack it, but I kept it simple, and just run the runsnake.py directly with the wrapper:

runwx ./lib/python2.7/site-packages/runsnakerun/runsnake.py \ ~/mycode.prof

And, it works!

Improvements welcome. I'm just happy that it's working. Not everything "just works" when you're on a Mac.

Other articles

Joysticks on Mac OS X in Flightgear

Mon 11 March 2013
By Michael P. Soulier

In Technology.

tags: OS X

I like flight simulators. I've played all of the good ones, Flightgear is an open-source flight simulator that isn't bad, and is steadily getting better with every release. While it is available to run on Mac, there's no way to calibrate the Joystick due to a lack of caring on …
read more
There are comments.
Brewing a better UNIX

Sun 09 December 2012
By Michael P. Soulier

In Technology.

tags: OS X UNIX FOSS

Being a Linux user, I'm used to a fairly standard set of tools on my command-line. On OS X, it's essentially BSD UNIX underneath, which I have had some experience with thanks to FreeBSD. The environment is very similar, but not identical, and on FreeBSD, you quickly find yourself using …
read more
There are comments.
Tweeting on OS X

Sun 25 November 2012
By Michael P. Soulier

In Technology.

tags: OS X Python FOSS

For some time my desktop has been an older, underpowered Linux box, so using services like Twitter via the website has been painful, as loaded with heavy javascript that would consume my CPU's limited resources.

So, like any Python programmer would do, I wrote my own client. Well, lets be …
read more
There are comments.
Joysticks? We don't need no stinking joysticks...

Mon 19 November 2012
By Michael P. Soulier

In Technology.

tags: OS X

So, after unpackaging my brand-spanking new Mac Mini, I grabbed a copy of the X-Plane demo, dropped in an old usb joystick and fired it up. Oddly, X-Plane itself asked me if I wanted to calibrate the joystick, which struck me as odd, that hasn't happened in years, not since …
read more
There are comments.
Umm, done unzipping yet?

Sat 17 November 2012
By Michael P. Soulier

In Technology.

tags: OS X

So, the first thing I did after after wrapping my head around the cocoa interface was to start installing software like a madman. I wanted Firefox, VLC, Kobo, Gimp, Vim, etc, etc, etc. So, I had to learn how to install apps on OS X.

Apps in OS X seem …
read more
There are comments.
Ok, nobody panic, there's a fruit on my screen

Fri 16 November 2012
By Michael P. Soulier

In Technology.

tags: OS X

I've needed a new desktop for a while now. As I'm primarily a Unix user, I typically buy a cheap PC and put Linux on it. This involves doing a bunch of research into available hardware to make sure that everything is going to work, like accelerated graphics for any …
read more
There are comments.

Page 1 / 1

But I Digress

Random neuron firings, digitized heedless of the repurcussions.

Other articles

Joysticks on Mac OS X in Flightgear

Brewing a better UNIX

Tweeting on OS X

Joysticks? We don't need no stinking joysticks...

Umm, done unzipping yet?

Ok, nobody panic, there's a fruit on my screen

Other articles

blogroll

social