How to install OS/X remotely
The following was passed to me verbatim by a professor in my area.
I haven’t tried it yet myself.
How to install OSX software remotely:
To update OSX remotely:
For example, how to install xcode and perl remotely on OSX:
1. GCC
If you need to build several programs from source, you need a compiler.
On OSX, the development environment is called xcode and can be
downloaded from http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/ — I had to
sign up for a free account first. To install the dmg remotely (see
detailed instructions at http://www.hmug.org/HowTos/RemoteInstall.html),
log on to the OSX machine and issue
You now have a build environment with gcc (3.3 and 4.0 in my case).
2. Perl
If you need a more recent verson of perl than what is included in OSX,
you can get the latest stable version, currently 5.8.8 (cf.
http://www.perl.com/download.csp):
This is a lengthy process — select defaults where possible, and say yes
to “Use the PerlIO abstraction layer.” I also said yes to threading, but
this may not be advisable. I accepted the default prefix, /usr/local.
Once configured,
If it checks out (I got a syslog error, likely because OSX uses
/var/log/system.log, which I ignored), you may want to switch to root
user before you install:
Next, if you’re using the bash shell, edit /etc/profile and add
/usr/local/bin to the PATH before /usr/bin. Issue
or, if you’re on the OSX machine, exit your user and log back in. Verify
that your default perl is your freshly compiled one:
should give you “/usr/local/bin/perl” and not “/usr/bin/perl”.
Incidentally, one problem with installing stuff remotely on OSX is that
the system keeps going to sleep on you; I use the wakeonlan program in
Linux to keep it awake.