My office iMac lost its Fusion Drive functionality during a past system upgrade, unbeknownst to me. It was so so slow! It took some online sleuthing to discover the likely cause and to organize a fix. The office iMac has regained its speed, but in doing so I perforce upgraded to MacOS Ventura. This broke the handful of applications leftover from Fink, a software package that has kept my Macs useful since the early 1990s. The Fink software package has never been updated to install properly in MacOS 11 (Big Sur), so installing it into Ventura would be a fool's game. The directories have been moved around and the older files won't compile. Luckily the Ports software package has been upgraded as MacOS has evolved, so I am switching to that.
Monday, May 29, 2023
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Converting Basemap to Cartopy within ObsPy Jupyter Notebooks
So far my trick is to replace the statement
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
with
import cartopy.crs as ccrs
Upgrading the Python Version within Anaconda
The upgrading of Python within Anaconda is complicated by the planned obsolescence of Python versions in the Anaconda software. As of 02/16/2023, Anaconda has support for Python 3.7 and higher. As a result, simply upgrading
conda install python=3.9
might work if you have 3.7 or 3.8 already installed. However, I had my obspy environment set up with Python 3.6, and the version would not update automatically. This prevented me from updating obspy and many other packages. My solution is to create a new environment for the upgrade, and install Python 3.9 directly into it. From the webpage:
https://www.geophysik.uni-muenchen.de/~megies/installation2.pdf
Create a new environment within Anaconda
conda create -n obspy39 python=3.9
conda activate obspy39
conda info --envs
assuming that you are in the obspy39 environment . . .
conda install -c conda-forge obspy
conda install jupyter
conda install cartopy
Note that I installed cartopy, rather than basemap. The latter would not install properly, and it is the older version anyway. At the end of this exercise, I had two obspy environments, obspy and obspy39. One can delete the older creakier version once you are certain that the new one works.
Updating Anaconda Navigator from Version 1.x to Version 2.x
Once Anaconda sits on your computer, the updates start to annoy you. If you ignore them long enough, however, they don't go away. Eventually, the upgrades will no longer be simple. For three of my MacOS computers, I first installed Anaconda 1.x, and for the home iMac I basically tore out my original installation in order to upgrade to Anaconda 2.x. Upgrading from 1.x to 2.x need not be that drastic. I discovered a procedure that works at a website
https://appdividend.com/2022/01/19/how-to-update-anaconda-upgrade-anaconda-navigator/
This procedure relies on entering line-commands in a terminal window, which you open within Anaconda Navigator. Just go to the base environment and open a Terminal, rather than search for a Jupyter Notebook or a Python window. In this Terminal, you might need to first update the conda app to its latest version
conda update conda
or
conda update -n base -c defaults conda
Then update Anaconda itself to a specific version, tied to a year and month, e.g.,
conda update anaconda=2022.10or conda install anaconda=2022.10In one case I installed the new Anaconda first, because the condo update hung the computer.That metapackage represents the pinned state that has undergone testing as a collection.
If you want to update all the packages under conda distribution, you can use the following command.
conda update --allThe conda update –all will upgrade everything. This updates all packages in the current environment to the latest version.
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Endless Upgrade Notes for MacOS 10.15.6 Catalina: making gfortran work
From August 18, 2020
I was using the Anaconda version of gfortran, and encountering problems with runtime libraries. I had used the standard MacOS C-compiler clang as an alias for my gcc, and clang lacks fortran support.
I switched to gcc-10 and gfortran-10, as of this date. The runtime library problems I had yesterday afternoon induced me to install a fresh compiler via the Fink project. http://www.finkproject.org I am still checking that things are working correctly -- Catalina messed up more of my computing environment than I knew.
some info on this issue from a real programmer is here
https://solarianprogrammer.com/2019/10/12/compiling-gcc-macos/
And my commands were
fink selfupdate
fink install gcc10
The fink command compiled the compilers from scratch, so it too a few hours on a 2019 MacBook Pro. Dont try this just before you need to carry your laptop someplace.