Prerequisites for OSX

Generally speaking, the Ocean is designed for people who are used to communicating with external computers via the ssh command line utility, copying files with scp, and communicating with serial devices with a program like screen or minicom. The rest of this documentation site will assume you have installed these programs.

If you have these tools installed, then you should not need to do anything further. If not, read on!

Using the terminal

You need access to the terminal program. OSX application can be found in the Applications/Utilties folder, here:

Alternatively, you can use Spotlight to instantly start the program. Hit Command-Space on you keyboard, and then type in Terminal, like this:

Once you start Terminal, it should look something like this:

Checking for pre-installed programs

Type the following to check that you have access to the required tools:

$ which screen; which ssh; which scp

You should get something to the following output if all of the required programs are installed:

/usr/bin/screen
/usr/bin/ssh
/usr/bin/scp

If you have got to this point, you should be ready to proceed to other sections in this document.

Installing missing programs

Most flavors of OSX will come with all of the required tools for communicating with an Ocean.

If one of the above programs is missing, we recommend the program Home Brew for re-installing the programs. Instructions for installing Home Brew are here.

screen, in particular, seems to be missing from some flavors of OSX. Once you have Home Brew, you can install screen like this:

$ brew install screen

Once your've installed screen, ensure that it installed correctly again:

$ which screen
/usr/bin/screen

Other useful stuff

Here's a great guide here that will tell you how to install minicom: Macs and serial TTYs

Here is another guide for setting up a version of screen that uses 256 colors: Installing GNU Screen on OS X in Homebrew