Three guides for naccess, hbplus and ligplot.

Naccess, a how to guide for Mac OS X.

This is the first part if a guide for installing naccess, hbplus and ligplot in Mac OS X. All of this program are distributed as source code. They are free  but you are required to sign an agreement and understand the license to get the code.

Ok, that being said there are a few requirements besides the source code. Requirement number one, find your terminal. Unless you are a command line geek, you’ll need to reach into your Applications/Utilities folder to launch the terminal. The easiest way to do that would be pressing command+Shift+U. That will open a Finder window to the right folder.

Second, you need to install Xcode. From OS X 10.6 to 10.8 you can get Xcode for free through the App Store. Once that is installed you also have to make sure you install the command line tools. To do so, after you install Xcode, launch it and go to preferences. There you’ll go to the Downloads tab and click on install command line tools. (There are very good guides to do this and those can be easily found with google).

Third and last, I have found that having Fink installed is always very useful. (I have a guide to install Fink in Mac OS X 18.0 elsewhere in my blog.) Besides its usefulness, the Fink installation itself gives you a nice directory tree to place any program you dare to compile.

An optional step would be to setup additional compilers such as intel C+ and intel Fortran.

Well, let’s get it on.

Let’s start with naccess. If you got the right files, you should have a naccess.tar.gz file. To make things easy, move it to your desktop. To decompress, open a Terminal, move to the Desktop (cd Desktop) then type in:

tar -zxvf naccess.tar.gz

This will create a folder naccess2.1.1. Move into it (cd naccess2.1.1). Now, very few software comes without some kind of README file. Naccess has a README which contains instructions to install naccess. Those instructions are simple, type:

csh install.scr

Here is the first "gotcha", by default, the shell in Mac OS X is sh not csh. So, in order for that instruction to work we need to type

csh

first, then

source /sw/bin/init.csh

to activate Fink under this shell and finally

./csh install.scr

Try to install f77.

If everything went well, you should have two brand new executables, naccess and accall.
To make sure it works everywhere get the naccess folder to, let's say /sw/bin/custom/naccess2.1.1
Then add the following lines to your .profile, located in your home folder:

export NACCESS_DIR='/sw/bin/custom/naccess2.1.1'
PATH=$PATH":$NACCESS_DIR"

That should do it. Stay tuned for the next guide!

For questions, go to the comments.