Many of our Mac and Linux users now (or will soon) have new operating systems with the release of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and version 7 from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Scientific Linux (SL). We're adding support for these new operating systems and will phase out support for older versions in the coming months. As we've been testing these new versions we noticed a couple of bugs. Please read below for details and to find out how these changes will impact your software installation:
Mac OSX Users:
- MAC 10.10 Yosemite Bug: for applications that require X11, the 10.10 upgrade process appears to remove a symlink that is critical for xquartz on Mac and results in a missing library error: dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libXt.6.dylib. The easiest way to fix this problem is to install the latest version of Xquartz from xquartz.macosforge.org.
- 10.6 users - upgrade considerations: If you are using Mac OS X 10.6 you're missing out on the performance improvements in software and hardware that Apple has introduced over the past 5 years. Most of our members would benefit from upgrading to a 64-bit kernel, available in Mac OS X 10.8.5 Mountain Lion, 10.9.4 Mavericks, and now 10.10 Yosemite.
If you're still running 32-bit applications, most of these applications can run on the newest versions of the Mac OS. If your application needs specific 32-bit kernel extensions, however, your upgrade options are limited to a Mac OS that can still run a 32-bit kernel (Mac OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10 only run 64-bit kernels). But, in this case you could still upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7!
If you need to run legacy PowerPC applications using the Rosetta environment, you cannot upgrade. Snow Leopard 10.6 is the last version to offer this support.
Linux Users:
- CentOS 7 Bug Members that have upgraded to the newest CentOS 7 may notice a problem with Mesa software rendering, which PyMOL relies upon, that results in segfault due to a bug in a graphic library. Since most users utilize hardware graphics acceleration, this problem isn't significant, but please be aware.
- Linux 32-bit tree users: We will continue to support and maintain the existing 32-bit linux tree, but as of January 1, 2015 we will no longer install new software applications. If you are still running a 32-bit version of linux, we urge you to upgrade to take advantage of performance benefits and ensure you have access to the most recent software updates. You can use the "lscpu" command to find out if you are running a 32-bit OS and if your computer supports the x86_64 64-bit architecture.
- Linux 5 users - upgrade considerations: Version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Scientific Linux (SL) are now available. If your group is using version 5 from any of these Linux flavors, we recommend that you plan an upgrade to version 6, which we will support for the next 3 years. We will phase out support for version 5 over the coming months and concentrate our efforts on supporting versions 6 and 7 of these operating systems.