One of the inevitable joys of bioinformatic life is the installation of a variety of esoteric softwares on a variety of system. As I've just moved to a new position in a new institution, I get to go through this rigmarole again.
This time around I have an extra layer of faffery, as I am now for the first time using a Mac (having been on Ubuntu for the last ten years, and Windows in the distant recollections from before that). While the machine is gorgeous and responsive, I am still in the interminable murky phase where I don't know the intricacies and easy ways of doing things yet (and am still battling muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts!), which means that I'm back down the learning curve a little.
Anyway, as I've just discovered an incredibly easy way to install a very useful tool, I thought I'd share it.
I was installing the excellent RNA assembler Trinity on my iMac running OS X (El Capitan), or at least trying to, according to its website. However, despite attempts at using different (and newer) compilers, I kept running into this error, presumably reflecting my attempts at using alternative compilers failing:
clang: error: unsupported option '-fopenmp' trinity mac
Happily it turns out that Trinity is supported by the fantastic third party package manager homebrew, which I had coincidentally just installed anyway (you don't bundle wget in, what the heck Apple?).
Homebrew is easily installed following the details on their website, and then installing Trinity was as simple as this:
brew cask install java
brew install homebrew/science/trinity
Not only was this dead simple, but it automatically installed a number of other programs (as dependencies of Trinity) that were on my list to install anyway (e.g. trimmomatic and bamtools). It also installs everything directly to /usr/local/bin/, so there's no mucking about with your PATH required. Lovely.
NB: Whilst looking around for hints as to how to solve this problem, I did find this thread on SeqAnswers which suggests that you might need to take a little extra care when running Trinity on Mac systems as opposed to Linux. Something to bear in mind.
