Installing Gpredict
First - the program was written to drive telescopes, so that people can track satellites. As I have said I have not used Gpredict for that. To drive a telescope you need to load the "Ham libraries" or Hamlib, that is also available from MacPorts.
Gpredict went from version 1.3 to 2.0 in Dec 2017 with some significant changes; and shortly thereafter version 2.2 came out. Version 2.2 installed ok with MacPorts - as long as I made sure that I had the right MacPorts version for my version of the OS! I am now on Monterey and the application works great.
Why track satellites? Gpredict allows you to go outside and see satellites pass overhead, and also to identify satellites that you see. Also, there is a large community (mostly astronomers, professional and amateur) that tracks satellites and send those “observations” in to a central point, so that people can maintain orbital parameters on a number of satellites that the US Air Force will not release orbital parameters on. That is a long discussion that I hope to go into, later.
But it can be used to illustrate how orbits are related and it does that well. I asked in many forums where this kind of software resided - and got no useful answers. This site is one result of that.
(The Gpredict site tries to help but has one line about installing from MacPorts - that is the best way to install. Read the site for information about Gpredict but just go to MacPorts to install it.)
Installing Gpredict:
First the applications that you get from MacPorts are ported Unix applications and will not use the Mac GUI, so you need to supply another one (they are often referred to as Windowing applications) and I use XQuartz. This used to be called X11 when it was supplied by Apple and that still appears in the dialog boxes. Go to XQuartz.com and install the application.
With MacPorts
Step 1 is to go to MacPorts and get the MacPorts code, make sure you get the right one for your OS version! https://www.macports.org/index.php
Read “Installing MacPorts” and see if that makes sense. Definitely read the ReadMe file!! I will try to provide some assistance via email, see the Contact Me page.
Open a terminal session and follow the directions from the ReadMe file.
The key command is “sudo port install gpredict"
This may take even a couple of hours as MacPorts installs dependencies - files that allow Unix programs to run. Just let it run, maybe for a couple of hours, until it is finished. If you have to stop the process, do so. Then when you can pick it up again just reissue the install command and it will see which dependencies had successfully been installed and start from there.
With Homebrew
This looks like a good option though I have tried it only with Yosemite (10.10.5) and it failed to install all of the dependencies. I am going to update my OS and try again, it runs very much like the MacPorts installation. https://brew.sh/
Now Let's Get Gpredict To Run And Do Something Useful
as of: 20 apr 2024