The dieing tigers of linguists

It has come to my attention that two out of the many linguists I know, have Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. Macs are expensive, despite this fact many grad students switch to Macs mid way through their studies (usually when their laptop's power cable burns up or the processor is too slow to handle their anti-virus software, some because they're tired of fighting with installing LaTeX packages on Windows).

Indeed many of my friends who got Tiger 4-5 years ago are in the position that they are doubly inspired to decide their research is ready for the light of day, graduate and get a job before their Tiger dies so they can afford a new computer. Little did I realize the meaning of this until I tried to teach them how to use Git to make sure they wouldn't loose their data or the LaTeX source for their dissertation...

So in order to seek out and empathize with this hopefully small intersection of the Tiger and Linguist populations I created a couple of polls.

Suffice it to say, that to install Git on any computer except Tiger is double-click-easy (even on Windows). Not so on Tiger. Here are my notes (thanks to many sources).

• Download XCode 2.5 (the last one on Tiger)


• Install expat (most recent)

curl http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz
tar -xvzf expat-2.0.1.tar.gz
cd expat-2.0.1
./configure
make
sudo make install



• Install asciidoc 8.2.7

curl http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/asciidoc-8.2.7.tar.gz2
tar -xvzf asciidoc-8.2.7.tar.gz2
cd asciidoc-8.2.7
sudo ./install.sh



• Install Git

cd /usr/local/src
tar xvzf git-1.5.6.tar.gz
cd git-1.5.6
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install