My Mac thinks Celestia is on a cd

[Michael McCollough]

Or some type of removable, non-modifiable medium at any rate. The Celestia folder can't be modified, even to the extent of adding or removing a character to the ReadMe, and the default 'removable medium' icon appears on my desktop when I install the program. Has anyone else had this problem? If so, has anyone discovered a solution?
Celestia 1.4.1, btw.

[julesstoop]

Are you sure you copied Celestia and the Celestia resources directory to their appropriate locations on your HD after you mounted the .dmg?

[Michael McCollough]

I'm sure I haven't. The Celestia folder shows up in the root directory right alongside the network (which I'm not actually connected to), the hardrive and my external hardrive; it can't be copied or moved anywhere. The program works but it can't be modified in any way, such as installing add-ons or changing the Config file.

Thanks, though.

[julesstoop]

I don't understand you.
You do know how to install software on OS X in general, don't you?

Just to be sure, I'll explain it to you step by step.

1. Double-click celestia-osx-1.4.1.dmg. A white drive icon named "Celestia" should appear on your desktop and in the source list of Finder windows.

2. Open the contents of the white icon by clicking (finder window) or double clicking (desktop) on it. You'll see something like this:



3. Drag the icon named "Celestia" to your applications folder on your HD (or to any other folder on your HD, for that matter). You can do this by - among other methods - dropping it on the icon named "Applications" in the source list on the left side of the Finder window. This action will copy the application from the mounted .dmg volume to the filesystem on your HD.

4. Do something similar with the folder named "CelestiaResources" only in this cae the target location is not your Applications folder but the folder named "Application Support". If you are going to be the sole user of Celestia on your Mac, it is located at the following path:
Macintosh HD/Users/your_user_name/Library/Application Support

In most literature the first three steps of this path are oftenly referd to as ~ which stands for 'your home directory'

5. After the copying is finished, you can safely unmount the Celestia disk image by pressing the eject icon next to the white disk icon in the Finder window, you won't need it any longer. Alternatively you could of course opt to save the read-me files to other locations on your HD as well.

6. You can now run Celestia by double clicking it's icon in your Applications folder. You can choose to modify the files in CelestiaResources as much as you want to.

[Michael McCollough]

Thank you. In my defense, I grew up on DOS and I've never had to manually install software on a Mac. For that matter, my wife grew up on Macintosh and she didn't know how that worked either; just one of those odd lacunae in our education I guess. Anyway, once again I thank you, and I apologize for bothering the board with a personal problem.

[selden]

Michael,

It's not a "personal problem". I'm sure others have been in the same situation but just gave up and didn't bother to ask.

[julesstoop]

It's nice you asked. :)
I mean, this whole thing with using disk images as containers for software on OS X it is not as straightforward as it could be.

More recently you'll often see something like this:



illustrating the action to be performed. Some developers even go as far as putting a functioning alias (=shortcut) to your applications folder in the DMG instead of just a picture of it.