Install GMT 6 on Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.6?

Q&A
1

Hi,
Is there a way to install GMT6 on Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.6? I’ve tried with both brew and ports and they fail complaining that my OS is too old for GMT6. Is there a work around other than upgrading my OS X, which is going to be quite messy with dependencies I have with operations other than GMT. I need GMT6 for GMTSAR.

Thank you!

Januka

2

Hi Januka,

I am running GMT6.x on an old MacPro from ~2012 that uses 10.13.x High Sierra (and is not upgradable anymore). The way forward is to compile everything from source which should not be too much of a drama apart from taking more time. gdal has always been a bit of a pain but for the old system William Kygnesbury’s frameworks still work so that goes long way saving you the hassle of GDAL-dependencies (if you need functionality > GDAL 3.2, then you will need to compile this from source, unfortunately, as William’s frameworks only go up to GDAL v 3.2).

So what you’d need to do is to get the dependencies and effectively follow the steps detailed in the BUILDING.md document. Other than building things from source I wouldn’t have a suggestion. Possibly downgrading the version of homebrew, but again, that might not work and in the end turn out to be more of a time sink compared to building all from source.

Good luck,
Christian

3

Hi Januka,

I was able to install GMT via anaconda, just create a virtual environment. However, I was unable to install GMTSAR. After several attempts, the easiest way to workaround was to borrow another computer with another operating system :(.

Maybe a virtual machine with linux could be an answer.

4

Thank you Christian! This is how I used to install earlier versions of GMT. I thought the process is getting easier! will give it a shot.

5

Thank you! I am trying to avoid anaconda installation to have a standalone installation. Perhap will keep this as a last resort.

6

This is what worked:
GMT failed with Homebrew. I then uninstalled Homebrew + Macports and started from scratch by installing Macports and then using Macports to install GMT. Macports managed to install GMT6.4!! Homebrew is not the way to go with older Mac OS versions because it keeps failing for whatever the reason. The key is to start from scratch and uninstalling + un-linking everything related to GMT.

7

I also realised that Macports is much more forgiving with arcane OS versions - I only switched recently as I discovered as well that homebrew didn’t work anymore.