[ros-users] Progress in rviz on OSX

[David Rajaratnam]

Hi,

I've just joined the mailing list today and was searching through the
archives and noticed this thread on getting rviz to work under OSX
(running X and not Carbon or Cocoa)

In case others are interested I've managed to get it working, although
more by luck than anything else. Adminttedly, I'm new to ROS so haven't
actually done anything useful under rviz, but I've definitely gotten
past the splash screen and onto the main rviz window.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my experience in case it might help someone
else.

I've installed/uninstalled/re-installed various macports so many times
that I'm not exactly sure what exactly got things working. However here
are some of the things I noted down:

I found the following discussions useful. Although some of it was out of
date, and I ended up installing and the removing the prepackaged
OgreSDK.

http://ros-users.122217.n3.nabble.com/rviz-on-snow-leopard-td817095.html

http://ros-users.122217.n3.nabble.com/ogre-tools-broken-on-CTurtle-Snow-leopard-td1443501.html

I installed the latest Nvidia CG toolkit from the nvidia webpage:

http://developer.nvidia.com/page/cg_main.html


As someone else noted in this thread I had to change #ifdef __WXMAC__ to
#ifdef __APPLE__ (actually I just deleted the necessary bits - since by
that stage the frustration was getting to me). 

What might be important is that during my initial attempts to compile
rviz, it compiled ok without these changes (although it did segfault at
the splash screen). It was only after removing the old OgreSDK and
removing/re-installing various macport packages that it actually failed
to compile and I needed to change the code. And then the only change I
needed to make to get things to compile was the bit that was looking for
'sigtimedwait' instead of 'sigwait' (around line 284 of
rviz/visualizer_app.cpp). The fact that it previous compiled must mean
that something somewhere was incorrectly defining __WXMAC__. I wonder if
whatever caused that is still lurking in your attempts to compile and
that is why you are still getting the segfaults?

One thing that may or may not be relevant. I'm running 32-bit Snow
Leopard (sadly I'm still using a first generation macbook). I don't know
what would be different when compiling on 64 bit Mac OSX.

One question. When I initially ran rviz I was getting a missing library
error for libassimp.1.dylib. So I had to set:

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=<my path to dimondback>/robot_model/assimp/lib/ 

Any thoughts on why its not finding this one library?

Anyway thanks and good luck,
Dave