Installation in Mac OSX El Capitan

[Dr.Aslam]

I am teaching a course on Prolog. I tried to install SWI-Prolog on my mac using the downloaded dmg file. When I start a new file the program immediately exits. Can anyone suggest a remedy. It is difficult for me to go back to Yosemite 

Thanks to all

[Jan Wielemaker]

I'm afraid there is only bad news. El Captain seems to have broken the
app's Qt based console (rendering text black-on-black), X11 is not
working and for the console version, GNU readline does not properly
update the console.

This has all been reported in the past couple of weeks. It immediately
exitting is a new symptom :( This all dispite 7.3.10 is built on
Yosemite using the latest Xcode, X11, Qt and Macports readline.

So far, nobody has a clue. The only good news is that the console based
Macports binary is reported to work properly. That does not give an app,
but a Prolog that runs in the terminal, supports the X11 IDE and command
line editing.

I'm afraid this requires support from an experienced Apple developer
with a proper Mac. I know a few tricks, but I've seen bad messages
updating an old Mac to El Captain (it is already hopelessly slow on
Yosemite).

Sorry --- Jan

P.s. If someone can confirm El Captain will work and not be much
slower than Yosemite on my iMac from 2008 (2.66Ghz Intel
Core 2 duo, 4Gb, ATI HD 2600), I'll attempt to upgrade.
Please be sure, if this mac breaks it will be a while
before there are new apps! There is plenty of disk space
as it only has the os, Xcode, a minimal Macports
and SWI-Prolog :)

[Fred Mesnard]

> On 11/03/2015 10:44 AM, Dr.Aslam wrote:
>> I am teaching a course on Prolog. I tried to install SWI-Prolog on my
>> mac using the downloaded dmg file. When I start a new file the program
>> immediately exits. Can anyone suggest a remedy. It is difficult for me
>> to go back to Yosemite

Could the beautiful
http://swish.swi-prolog.org
help?

FWIW: I’m running El Capitan on a Mac Book Aluminium, end of 2008, 8 Gb,
2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 Mo without problem.
With 2 Gb it was terribly slow. Under XQuartz 2.7.8,
http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/devel/bin/SWI-Prolog-7.3.10.dmg
seems to runs fine, even gtrace. I had to allow OS X to run wild applications.

Cheers,
Fred

>
> I'm afraid there is only bad news. El Captain seems to have broken the
> app's Qt based console (rendering text black-on-black), X11 is not
> working and for the console version, GNU readline does not properly
> update the console.
>
> This has all been reported in the past couple of weeks. It immediately
> exitting is a new symptom :( This all dispite 7.3.10 is built on
> Yosemite using the latest Xcode, X11, Qt and Macports readline.
>
> So far, nobody has a clue. The only good news is that the console based
> Macports binary is reported to work properly. That does not give an app,
> but a Prolog that runs in the terminal, supports the X11 IDE and command
> line editing.
>
> I'm afraid this requires support from an experienced Apple developer
> with a proper Mac. I know a few tricks, but I've seen bad messages
> updating an old Mac to El Captain (it is already hopelessly slow on
> Yosemite).
>
> Sorry --- Jan
>
> P.s. If someone can confirm El Captain will work and not be much
> slower than Yosemite on my iMac from 2008 (2.66Ghz Intel
> Core 2 duo, 4Gb, ATI HD 2600), I'll attempt to upgrade.
> Please be sure, if this mac breaks it will be a while
> before there are new apps! There is plenty of disk space
> as it only has the os, Xcode, a minimal Macports
> and SWI-Prolog :)
>

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[Jan Wielemaker]

On 11/03/2015 12:56 PM, Fred Mesnard wrote:
>> On 11/03/2015 10:44 AM, Dr.Aslam wrote:
>>> I am teaching a course on Prolog. I tried to install SWI-Prolog on my
>>> mac using the downloaded dmg file. When I start a new file the program
>>> immediately exits. Can anyone suggest a remedy. It is difficult for me
>>> to go back to Yosemite
>
> Could the beautiful
> http://swish.swi-prolog.org
> help?

Surely some people run courses on it!

> FWIW: I’m running El Capitan on a Mac Book Aluminium, end of 2008, 8 Gb,
> 2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 Mo without problem.
> With 2 Gb it was terribly slow. Under XQuartz 2.7.8,
> http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/devel/bin/SWI-Prolog-7.3.10.dmg
> seems to runs fine, even gtrace. I had to allow OS X to run wild applications.

Thanks. So you say all runs fine!? That makes the whole thing even
weirder. How do we begin to find out what is different between your
version and the failing ones??

So, with 8Gb I should be fine. Unfortunately this old university iMac
is long out of support. I managed to prevent it from being dumped so
I have a Mac for compiling and testing Prolog but it was a clear
"ok, but no warrants" :)

Thanks for the report

--- Jan

[Fred Mesnard]

> Le 3 nov. 2015 à 16:16, Jan Wielemaker <J.Wiel...@vu.nl> a écrit :
>
>> FWIW: I’m running El Capitan on a Mac Book Aluminium, end of 2008, 8 Gb,
>> 2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 Mo without problem.
>> With 2 Gb it was terribly slow. Under XQuartz 2.7.8,
>> http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/devel/bin/SWI-Prolog-7.3.10.dmg
>> seems to runs fine, even gtrace. I had to allow OS X to run wild applications.
>
> Thanks. So you say all runs fine!? That makes the whole thing even weirder. How do we begin to find out what is different between your
> version and the failing ones??

Some possibilities:
- I’ve installed the latest XQuartz
http://www.xquartz.org
- we don’t have the same video card.

Cheers,
Fred

[Paulo Moura]

I also have the latest XQuartz version but I get the black bars instead of text in the SWI-Prolog.app application. My MacBook Pro uses a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M video card. A video card driver bug is indeed a plausible explanation. But no problems using SWI-Prolog from the command-line. Readline also works fine. What exactly are the problems with it and how to reproduce them?

Cheers,

Paulo

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Paulo Moura
Logtalk developer

Email: <mailto:pmo...@logtalk.org>
Web: <http://logtalk.org/>
-----------------------------------------------------------------

[Jan Wielemaker]

I don't have a problem (but I'm still on Yosemite). My XQuartz is one
version behind though. The most commonly reported problem is the text
renders black-on-black in the app. A different video card seems a long
shot. I don't know enough about Qt and organization of Apple graphics to
tell whether that can or cannot make sense.

Cheers --- Jan

P.s. My iMac can handle max 4Gb :(

[Jan Wielemaker]

On 11/03/2015 02:00 PM, Paulo Moura wrote:
>
>> On 03/11/2015, at 12:51, Fred Mesnard <frederic...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Le 3 nov. 2015 à 16:16, Jan Wielemaker <J.Wiel...@vu.nl> a écrit :
>>>
>>>> FWIW: I’m running El Capitan on a Mac Book Aluminium, end of 2008, 8 Gb,
>>>> 2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 Mo without problem.
>>>> With 2 Gb it was terribly slow. Under XQuartz 2.7.8,
>>>> http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/devel/bin/SWI-Prolog-7.3.10.dmg
>>>> seems to runs fine, even gtrace. I had to allow OS X to run wild applications.
>>>
>>> Thanks. So you say all runs fine!? That makes the whole thing even weirder. How do we begin to find out what is different between your
>>> version and the failing ones??
>>
>> Some possibilities:
>> - I’ve installed the latest XQuartz
>> http://www.xquartz.org
>> - we don’t have the same video card.
>
> I also have the latest XQuartz version but I get the black bars
instead of text in the SWI-Prolog.app application. My MacBook Pro uses a
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M video card. A video card driver bug is indeed a
plausible explanation. But no problems using SWI-Prolog from the
command-line. Readline also works fine. What exactly are the problems
with it and how to reproduce them?

So far, I know about these problems with the binaries on MacOSX:

- Crash on startup (has happened before on some Macs, never diagnosed)
- App has black-on-black text (El Captain only, but apparently not all
installations). Note that the app is Qt-based, which does *not* use
X11.
- X11 crashes (mostly El Captain, but this too has happened before).
Use ?- emacs. from either the app or commandline version to test.
- GNU readline line update fails. If you type something and than
use the <- (backspace) the feedback is as if you typed a space.
The last character is deleted though. This applies to swipl running
in Terminal.app. Again only on some installations. Seems common
on El Captain, but a colleague also had it on Yosemite.

Only the last has a work-around: run "swipl -tty" to prevent it from
trying to control the terminal.

The most annoying thing is that the same binary works fine on system A
and fails on system B for no clear reason ...

Cheers --- Jan

[Jan Wielemaker]

On 11/03/2015 02:10 PM, Jan Wielemaker wrote:
>
> So far, I know about these problems with the binaries on MacOSX:
>
> - Crash on startup (has happened before on some Macs, never diagnosed)
> - App has black-on-black text (El Captain only, but apparently not all
> installations). Note that the app is Qt-based, which does *not* use
> X11.
> - X11 crashes (mostly El Captain, but this too has happened before).
> Use ?- emacs. from either the app or commandline version to test.
> - GNU readline line update fails. If you type something and than
> use the <- (backspace) the feedback is as if you typed a space.
> The last character is deleted though. This applies to swipl running
> in Terminal.app. Again only on some installations. Seems common
> on El Captain, but a colleague also had it on Yosemite.

I have upgraded my Mac to El Captain. None of the above issues
reproduces, i.e., all seems to run fine. I've extended the issue
on GitHub [1]. Please add your comments there, so we might see some
pattern.

Thanks --- Jan

[1] https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/issues/issues/30

[Paulo Moura]

Workaround found :-) See the link below to the issue tracker for the details.

[Jan Wielemaker]

On 11/05/2015 01:51 PM, Paulo Moura wrote:
> Workaround found :-) See the link below to the issue tracker for the details.

Great! That makes it al least a little usable. Should mean that this
is not a problem for first time users :) Unlike you, I can't change the
font, even after deleting the preferences.

Carlo, do you have a clue whether that can be our mistake? Qt? El Captain?

Cheers --- Jan

[Carlo Capelli]

2015-11-05 14:25 GMT+01:00 Jan Wielemaker <J.Wiel...@vu.nl>:

On 11/05/2015 01:51 PM, Paulo Moura wrote:

Workaround found :-) See the link below to the issue tracker for the details.

Great!  That makes it al least a little usable.  Should mean that this is not a problem for first time users :)  Unlike you, I can't change the
font, even after deleting the preferences.

Carlo, do you have a clue whether that can be our mistake?  Qt?  El Captain?

Sorry, I have no clue... I think could be a bug in custom colors storage.
Qt implements its own serialization, writing binary data as text that we store in user preference file, maybe we're missing proper handling of the alpha component now...

Just an hypothesis, I don't have a Mac to explore the problem...