[ros-users] Progress in rviz on OSX

[Paul Vernaza]

Hi David,

Good to hear you've had some luck with rviz on the Mac, and thanks for
documenting it a bit.  Some comments below...

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 8:07 PM, David Rajaratnam
<daver_ml at gemarex.com.au> wrote:
> 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?

Unfortunately, I dug around a bit with gdb, and the problem I was
having is deeper than that.  Basically, wx-gtk was giving Ogre an X
window to render in, when it expected a native window, which does not
work at all.  More info here:
https://code.ros.org/trac/ros-pkg/ticket/4852.

> 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.

This is the major problem, unfortunately.  Everything breaks going to
64-bit.  It is worth noting, though, that it is possible to manually
boot OS X 10.6 into the 32-bit kernel:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3773.  So, if people are really
desperate for rviz on the Mac, I guess that's one option.

> 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?

It's a bug in the package: https://code.ros.org/trac/ros-pkg/ticket/4852.

Paul