LkbMacintosh

Running the LKB on macOS

There are three recommended ways of running the LKB on macOS: the first is to use 'LKB-FOS' (the fully open source version of the LKB); the other two involve running a Linux version of the LKB in a virtual machine.

LKB-FOS is based on the version of the LKB that has been developed over the past several years in Allegro CL on Linux. There are currently pre-built native binaries of LKB-FOS for macOS and Linux. See LkbFos for more information and installation instructions.

An alternative approach is to run a Linux version of the LKB in a virtual machine. The most convenient way to to this is with Ubuntu+LKB, a VirtualBox appliance based on Ubuntu Linux.

If you want to run the full LOGON software infrastructure, including the LKB, [incr tsdb()] and associated tools, you should use a different virtual machine approach. This is based on Docker. Since Docker VMs are minimal and headless, the graphical display needs to be redirected to an X11 server (XQuartz) on your macOS machine. Lluís Padró has kindly created a Linux image with all LOGON requirements (which are basically emacs, plus some X11 and rendering libraries) and a script that takes care of the needed display redirections and volume mappings. The download contains the Linux image, the dockerfile to re-create it (not needed, but helpful if you want to re-create the image yourself), the script to launch the VM, and a README explaining it all. Although this approach works quite well, note that the VM session often does not survive if the machine running it goes to sleep.

An updated version of the Docker-based approach created by Lluís Padró is available here, this version is maintained by AlexandreRademaker.