A hack I needed to perform to get Ardour to run

Just a head’s up in case it helps anyone:

I run Tiger (10.4.11), and I downloaded the Ardour 2.1 .dmg and installed. I got the " no X11 found " error message, and then it shuts down. i HAVE X11 installed, but I removed Apple’s Tiger XFree86 X11 build, and compiled Leopard’s X.org X11 build for myself, so there was no /applications/utilities/X11.app. instead there is a /applications/Xdarwin.

So I had to open the installed Ardour2 package, go to /Ardour2.app/Contents/Resources/script and edit the top lines to read:

#!/bin/sh

Author: Aaron Voisine aaron@voisine.org

if [ ! -x /Applications/XDarwin.app ] ; then

Now the program boots up like it should since all the other system files are in the same place. The X11.app is only a launcher

And I know that this was brought up before, but just to help you guys save face, the 2.1 release notes state:

“Ready to make music on those long nights after the clocks change up north? Ready to make music in the bright summer evenings down south? Ardour 2.1 squeaks out in time for both hemispheres to enjoy it. A few brand new features, including native (X11-free) OS X support, and a heap of important bug fixes, are there to make the upgrade worth your time. (link)Source code(link) is available as well as the (link)DMG for X11 on Mac OS X(link).”

That says is that if one were to click on the link to download the dmg for Ardour2.1, then the dmg for Ardour2.1 at the other end of that link will include “including native (X11-free) OS X support”… which it does not. The only indication that it is NOT true that the “DMG for X11 on Mac OS X” link link does not include native OSX support is:

““native” OS X support
-no need for X11 anymore.
-built using the GTK-OSX port of GTK to Quartz/Cocoa
-to compile this on OSX, please read the guide”

Which STILL does not say that the DMG has no native support… it merely says that if you wish to build Ardour with native support, you should follow the link to learn how to do so.

You guys are taking a lot of flack and losing a lot of face around the internet about the program not working because it is not clear that you need X11 to be installed for the DMG version to run, so people don’t know that: they just think that it is broken, and then tell that to everyone else. You might want to fix the wording.

As a side note… this is no fault of yours, but Jack is also still a mess. The developers blame Apple for moving the default init startups (defining the screen to the xserver, etc), but they did it to be compatible with Xorg across distros… now the programers who didn’t read their developer notes are having trouble.

Fair points about the release notes - I have modified them. In retrospect, it was silly of me to mention the native stuff in the way that I did.

Please point me to the “flack” and “face losing” online, so I can go and read it and, where necessary, comment myself.

I was hoping to have released the native version already but (a) we ran into a variety of minor issues that seem to vary from machine to machine, and took a while to release (b) my OS X development work has been very focused on SAE’s (excellent) design requirements. This work has hopefully reached its peak, and I believe that the native version is more or less for deployment, although some underlying technology (GTK/OSX) still has a few issues that cause parts of the UI to be not as responsive as the X11 version.

Regarding JACK, are you talking about QJackctl or something else? I can’t think of any other part of JACK that has any connection to X11.