So I’ve finally decided to get a Mac. “But Steen!” my friends say, “I thought you were Mrs. All-Linux-All-The-Time!”
Well, I still am! Even though I still like others better, to be honest Macs also essentially run on a Linux distro.
Initial thoughts:
- It looks like I will have to manually install Basemap to get it working on the Mac so I can do this on it, as even Homebrew doesn’t have it. Which isn’t so bad, but since I already have a working machine with Basemap set up, it is easy for me to slide into laziness and not manually install it on the Mac. But I’ll probably do it eventually.
- Macs have `say`
- MACS ARE MADE OF METAL. Nothing drives home the reality of how often you use your laptop without pants quite like getting a metal laptop.
- I only use the terminal on my Mac because I cannot figure out the GUI for the life of me. Like, what the heck is going on there? At least the terminal is familiar!
But then again, there’s this:
uniq on mac only compares first 8kb of line, use sort -u instead #waytoospecificcmdlineadvice
— Pall Melsted (@pmelsted) February 12, 2016
That is legitimately terrifying :/
I’ll be sure to continue using my other machine for any sort of bioinformatic work.
But it is not all bad, I always have fun getting to know a new computer. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all pans out.
Agreed Mac laptops are the best! Have you considered running Linux in a virtual machine?
I use VirtualBox and it’s great. But get a lot of disk and memory because you will need it.
Yea, definitely, Macs are pretty light on the memory side.
Make sure to use iTerm2 rather than the built-in Terminal, if you haven’t done so yet. Also, I recommend Spectacle for something that gets you close to Linux window-management capabilities.
I see basemap on pip, is that not what you’re looking for?
I don’t remember what the issue with Basemap was that I was having when I wrote that, most likely it was due to unfamiliarity with the new computer or something. I also don’t remember how I did it, but Basemap is now installed on my Mac. Haha, sorry I know that is vague. I thiiiink I just found a way to add the Basemap repository to Homebrew?
But pip doesn’t work for Basemap anymore, because it is too large to be hosted on Pypi and the new versions of pip don’t allow you to download the externally hosted package. Or something like that. So, even on Ubuntu, I had to apt-get install python-mpltoolkits.basemap
Just for reference, the following worked on my mac:
brew install geos
pip install git+git://github.com/matplotlib/basemap.git