view code: install.command

The installation script install.command found inside the Homer disk image was written in bash and made executable by typing chmod 755 and appending the .command extension in the filename. When the user double-clicks on it, Mac OS X automatically opens the Terminal.app window and runs the script. Depending on the ownership and permissions of the /usr/local folder, the script may require the user to authenticate as admin.

The script runs the a modified version of homebrew.rb installaiton script to allow an offline installation. That is, instead of downloading the tarball from GitHub, the script untars a local archive mxcl-homebrew-3545a8d.tar.gz, pre-downloaded from GitHub and included in the Homer installation package. If you wish to update homebrew to the latest version simply type brew update in the Terminal.app.

Most of the included hombrew “formulas” would require XCode – i.e. Apple’s OSX Developer Tools – in order to be compiled from their source code. However, we decided to distribute pre-compiled binaries along with the Homer package for Mac, so that you won’t necessarily need to install XCode to run the Homer script on your Mac. To compile them we used Homebrew and XCode 4.1 running OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.1, respectively for the Snow Leopard’s and Lion’s version of the Homer installer for Mac, which thus comprise two different packages for the two latest version of the OSX. We couldn’t compile it for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, as the latter is not compatible with the MacBook Air. For the same reason, the software included is compatible only with Intel Macs like the Air, and not also for older PowerPC Macs. If you manage to compile it with older versions of OS X and older architectures, you are welcome to share here with us the results.

The package also include some pre-compiled Ruby gems (see the list below). However, these are not installed in the default /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8 folder, which is owned by root:wheel and would thus require another sudo, but inside Homebrew’s Cellar directory in the /usr/local folder, whose group ownership is set to admin by Homebrew installation script, and therefore does not require the super user privileges (provided the user actually belongs to admin group). To this purpose, a RubyGem plugin called Brewbygems is installed. This adds post-install and post-uninstall hooks to RubyGems that update the symlinks in your Homebrew /usr/local/bin/ folder. The user’s RubyGems prefix is also changed to /usr/local/Cellar/gems/1.8 by adding the corresponding $GEM_HOME variable to the ~/.bashrc profile, so that every time you gem install anything you will no longer need to sudo.

Please note that if you have already another copy of Homebrew installed in /usr/local, or if you have installed any of the following programs with another package manager (e.g., MacPorts, Fink, etc.), but you still want to use the automatic installer, then it is advisable to completely remove all those programs before running the Homer installer, to avoid unexpected errors or conflicts. Alternatively, you can install the various programs manually and then download the standalone Homer bash script from here.

Software included

The installation script installs the following programs into the specified locations:

• Homebrew, the missing package manager for OS X:

           /usr/local/bin/brew
           /usr/local/Library/Formula/...
           /usr/local/Library/Homebrew/...

• ImageMagick, open source software suite for manipulating images, with its dependencies (version 6.7.1–1, binaries compiled through Homebrew):

           /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.7.1-1/...
           /usr/local/Cellar/jpeg/8c/...
           /usr/local/Cellar/jasper/1.900.1/...
           /usr/local/Cellar/little-cms/1.19/...
           /usr/local/Cellar/libtiff/3.9.5/...

• JBIG2 encoder, compression tool for bi-level images (binary compiled through Homebrew):

           /usr/local/Cellar/jbig2enc/0.27-17b36fa/...

• Tesseract-ORC, free open source OCR engine sponsored by Google, with Leptonica library for enhanced image processing (version 3.00, binary compiled through Homebrew):

           /usr/local/Cellar/tesseract/3.00/...
           /usr/local/Cellar/leptonica/1.68/...

• Brewbygems, making RubyGems and Homebrew play nice together:

           /usr/local/Cellar/gems/1.8/gems/brewbygems-0.4.0/...

• Hpricot, HTML parser (pre-compiled Ruby gem):

           /usr/local/Cellar/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.8.4/...

• RMagick, interface between the Ruby programming language and ImageMagick (pre-compiled Ruby gem):

           /usr/local/Cellar/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-2.13.1/...

• pdfbeads, Ruby utility to create searchable PDF:

           /usr/local/Cellar/gems/1.8/bin/pdfbeads
           /usr/local/Cellar/gems/1.8/gems/pdfbeads-1.0.3/...

• Scan Tailor, interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages (version 1.0.0beta11 with experimental “Dewarping” support):

           /Applications/ScanTailor.app

• Homer, command-line script and GUI app (made with Automator) for renaming, rotating and binding scanned pages:

           /usr/local/bin/homer
           /Applications/Homer/Homer.app

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