Installing and starting the OT on MacOS

  1. Install the Java runtime environment (JRE) from the eclipse foundation. They provide JRE for both modern (Apple aarch64 CPU) and older (Intel x64 CPU) generation hardware. It is advisable to download the '.pkg' package because it is easier to install on your system. You can find the latest JRE 17 release at the following #855#>https://mytest.s3hq.eso.org:9000/test/how-to-install-alma-observing-tool.html#: :text=Eclipse
  2. After downloading the JRE software package. Double click on the file and it will open an installer application. Follow the instructions in the installer to complete the installation of JRE.
  3. Download the #856#>https://mytest.s3hq.eso.org:9000/test/how-to-install-alma-observing-tool.html#: :text=Download
  4. Open a terminal and extract the ALMA OT tarball
    	> tar xf alma-ot-c12.tgz
    
  5. Change directory into the setup directory and execute the setup-unix.sh shell script
    	> cd alma-ot-c12/setup
    	> bash ./setup-unix.sh
    	> cd ..
    
  6. Launch the ALMA OT application from the command line
    	> bash ./ALMA-OT.command
    
  7. Or launch the ALMA OT application from finder by opening the application directory and double clicking on the ALMA-OT.command icon

Please note: if you are planning to work on large proposals (e.g. including many sources and/or science goals) or on a Large Program you may consider increasing the maximum heap space memory size. This will improve the performance and usability of the ALMA OT application. The default value is typically 8 G but you can increase the maximum heap size by using the -max-heap-size command line option. In this example we increase the maximum heap space memory size to 16 G. You can set it to higher values, but please keep in mind the maximum memory available on your computer:

	> bash ./ALMA-OT.command --max-heap-size 16

Similar issues may affect tarball installation on a Mac as apply to the OT Installer (Section 2.1.4) e.g. the selection of “Allow Anyway” in “Security & Privacy”. After this, running the setup script again should work correctly.

The ALMA OT Team, 2025 Mar 21