Fresh install (MacOS 11)

Q&A
1

Hi there,

I finally installed a brand new clean version of Big Sur on my laptop, and now comes the time to re-install softwares.

Three of them gave me a headache last time : GMT, LaTeX… and Ghostscript because of the shared libraries and the lack of transparency support (-dSAFER if I remember correctly? I know the topic appears here two or three times a year…)

So here’s my question to more Unix-aware people :

How to install GS, GMT and LaTeX together as cleanly as possible?
From the bundles ? With Brew ? Compile it from the repo ?

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

How to install GS, GMT and LaTeX together as cleanly as possible?
From the bundles ? With Brew ? Compile it from the repo ?

If you’re already a Homebrew user, using homebrew is the easiest way.

3

But is it the cleanest? Because brew doesn’t propose latex nor old version of gs (if I’m not mistaken)

4

Homebrew now provides Ghostscript 9.53.3 (https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/ghostscript), which no longer has the transparency bug.

As for latex, Homebrew provides more options:

1 Like
5

macOS bundle may be the “cleanest” way to install GMT, but it also means you can only use the GMT stable releases, and can’t use the GMT master branch.

6

Hum… fair… I need to run a specific flag or is it just through brew update?
Thanks for the update on homebrew, I indeed was mistaken :slight_smile:

7

You can install the GMT master branch using

brew install gmt --HEAD

A few weeks later, if you want to update to the latest master branch, you need to run

brew reinstall gmt

to re-compile and re-install GMT. The compilation usually takes no more than 5 minutes for me.

8

:+1:
I’ll try that tomorrow:)