Building PSPP on a Mac pspp-users [][] [][][][][][] Building PSPP on a Mac From: Richard Brittain Subject: Building PSPP on a Mac Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:01:21 -0400 (EDT) Building PSPP on Mac OSX Hi, I'm helping to evaluate PSPP and wanted a Mac version, but the installation notes don't have much advice about building this on a Mac, so I plugged away and got a version that seems to install and run. I also a found a few questions about this in the list archives, but few answers, so I thought this list might like a description of what worked for me.

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I've done this right through on two PPC macs running 10.4.11. I've not yet tried it on a 10.5 system, or an intel Mac. I'm just a tinkerer, not a developer, when it comes to Macs, so there may be a more efficient way to do this.

Install Xcode developer tools and X11. I needed to upgrade Xcode to the latest version (2.4.1 for 10.4 systems) to make some errors in 'configure' go away.

You have to do that by downloading the.dmg from the Apple Developer web site. Xcode does not seem to get updates through the 'System Update' mechanism. The GUI version of PSPP needs X11 (not installed by default in 10.4, but on the distribution CD, optional packages). Install MacPorts from, if you don't already have it.

First, here's how to enable 'overtype' in MS Word for Mac 2011. When you are in a Word document: 1. Go to the WORD menu at the top of the screen. Select 'Preferences' 3. Under 'Authoring and Proofing Tools' select 'Edit' 4. Under 'Editing Options, put a checkmark in the box next to 'Overtype mode' and click OK. Overtype mode in word 2007. On the Word menu, click Preferences. Under Authoring and Proofing Tools, click Edit, and then in the Edit dialog box, select Replace existing text as you type (Overtype mode). Note: To turn off overtype mode, clear the check box next to Replace existing text as you type (Overtype mode). With the All Commands category highlighted in the left pane, scroll down the alphabetized list in the right pane until you see Overtype. Click and drag the Overtype command to your toolbar of choice. I added it to my Standard toolbar. Now just click to toggle Overtype mode on or off. Just like the good ol' days.

Edit /etc/profile or ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc and add '/opt/local/bin' to your $PATH setting. At the same time, add '/usr/local/bin' if it isn't there already, since pspp will install itself there. Make sure the ports package is updated, and install all the prerequisite libraries for PSPP sudo port selfupdate sudo port install yelp gsl plotutils This will run for _hours_, downloading sources from BSD ports repositories and compiling and installing them. It will automatically pull down all needed prerequisite packages. On my system I ended up with 94 port packages installed. You can use 'port list installed' to see them.

All of the prerequisites are supported ports. Some of the packages are just newer versions of things which the Mac has already, like perl and python. I suspect that the vast majority of the stuff installed by this step is not needed at run time by pspp.

Download the PSPP tarball and unpack it. I think it might help to put it in a location without weird characters in the pathname. The 'configure' script generated some errors which might have been due to my current directory being 'User's Documents' 6. In a terminal, cd to the unpacked psp source tree and run configure./configure CPPFLAGS='/opt/local/include' LDFLAGS='-L/opt/local/lib -L/usr/local/lib/pspp' The /opt/local settings let it find all the libraries installed by MacPorts. The /usr/local/lib/pspp seems to be necessary to let it later find the pspp dynamic libraries which will be placed there at the install step. Build pspp make 8. Test it make check I get 1 failing test in the set of 158.

The actual message is: 1c1.

RESEARCH METHODS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE Obtaining SPSS and PSPP (the latter is a no-cost alternative with no expiring license) To obtain a copy of SPSS on to your personal computer, check with the university's IT office to see if they will load it for you at no cost as part of the university's site licensing agreement. If this is not possible and you would like to rent a personal copy of SPSS at student pricing, you can do so by going here: and then doing a search for 'SPSS gradpack.' If you aren't inclined to purchase statistical software now, but think that it would be great to have long-term access to a program that is very similar to SPSS, you may want to take a look at downloading a copy of PSPP.

PSPP is a free, open-source statistics program that quite closely mimics almost all of the core features of SPSS. However, it does not have a license that will expire, and it doesn't have some of the limitations that some versions of SPSS impose for how many observations and variables your a dataset can have. You can learn more about PSPP here:. For most purposes, including all of the statistical analysis that we cover in political science classes at HPU, you don't have to choose between SPSS and PSPP. SPSS syntax (*.sps) and data files (*.sav) transfer back and forth between SPSS and PSPP. If you put some care into the process, you can create code that will run smoothly in either program. For what it is worth, your instructor uses SPSS at work when teaching methods classes (he uses Stata for his own work), but often chooses to use PSPP at home for class preparation because its point-and-click interface is so much less cluttered than SPSS's (i.e., PSPP lists just the most frequently used options and settings for most routines rather than giving users every option under the sun).