Installation of 2.0pr1 on Mac OS X 10.2.8

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This article has been retained as a historical document. It is not up-to-date and the formatting may be lacking. Use the information herein with caution.

These notes are the result of installing the server on an iBook running 10.2.8

MacOS X runs on top of freeBSD which is one of the systems that WeBWorK was built under. The difficulty is that the apache server which shipped with my copy of the operating server is not equipped with all of the features required by WeBWorK.

My versions:

  • Apache/1.3.27 (Darwin)
  • This is perl, v5.6.0 built for darwin

At a minimum the following programs will need to be added to apache or to the general operating system.

  • GD and libgd -- modules for creating graphics
  • netpbm -- modules for converting gif to png
  • libapreq -- apache module for reading cookies and handling requests.
  • dvipng -- creates .png versions of mathematics equations
  • tth -- creates HTML versions of mathematics equations
  • Many modules from CPAN. Use perl -MCPAN -e shell to load these.

I had mixed results using Fink to load the missing features. For somethings (for example netpbm) it worked great, particularly if the binaries were available. For GD and libapreq it was easier to build and install them by hand.

Some of the external programs may be located in directories which are not identical with those used by other unix installations.

  • latex -- std: /usr/local/bin/latex, my MacOS (uses TeX_Shop and teTeX) /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/latex