1.4 Installing ChessDB onto a Mac running OS X from the UNIX source code

There are some Mac OS X binaries, but these are mainly untested and will only work on PPC - they are not universal binaries. Furthermore, they are unlikely to be for the latest version of ChessDB, so you would be wise to build ChessDB from source on on your own Mac.

Not owning a Mac, I don't know the process in detail, but I gather you will need to do something like the following.

On Mac you need to install "UNIX Base" from the installer DVD and the "Developers Tools" in order to compile anything. You can get the last version of XCode (Apple's Integrated Development environment) from http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/
Install Tcl/Tk. Tcl/Tk Aqua is a binary distribution for the Mac, with some extensions. You can of course build Tcl/Tk from source code if you wish. The site for the sources is http://www.tcl.tk/
Note, some people might have the Tcl/Tk libraries on the Macs, which allows them to run programs requiring Tcl/Tk. But if don't have the header files, which are needed to build software, they will not be able to proceed until they are obtained. They should (I expect) be in the binary distribution from Tcl/Tk Aqua.
Download the ChessDB source code from Sourceforge. The source code is a compressed tar file. Tar files have the extension .tar and when compressed ..tar.gz. All source distributions of ChessDB will be in a file like ChessDB-3.6.4.tar.gz,
Decompress and untar the source code, which being a .tar.gz file, can be done as
$ tar xvfz ChessDB-3.6.4.tar.gz $ cd ChessDB-3.6.4 $ ./configure
Edit the installation path in the Makefile, which will have been created by the configure script.
$ make $ make install

That should have the code installed.

Notes from other uses

Since I don't have access to a Mac OS X system, I will mainly have to rely on others for information on OS X. As such, I will add the occasional note sent to me.

Tcl/TK Aqua binaries come with the Tiger

Dr. Kirkby
A quick note.

You might wish to note for people that, if they are running Tiger, Tcl/TK Aqua binaries came with the Tiger distro. More info is included at the Tcl/TK Aqua site Tcl/TK Aqua site. It's pretty easy to miss that link on the main tcltkaqua project page.

I compiled Scid-3.6.1 on Tiger with no problems. As yet, I haven't tried to compile ChessDB, but I should try shortly when my workload eases -- that is, before the start of Morelia-Linares on Saturday.

Yours,

Rick Vaughn (added 2007-02-14)

If you would like to contribute to the tutorial or see anything that should be updated, corrected or improved, please contact David Kirkby. But please note David only speaks English.

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This page was last modified: September 16, 2007. 10:41:38 am GMT