[gretl main page]

Getting gretl

You have a choice of the latest "official" release or the current "snapshot". The snapshot is more up to date: often it will contain bug-fixes but sometimes it will contain newly introduced bugs. To see what's new in the snapshot, take a look at the gretl Change log (the "in progress" entry).

Tip: If you're updating your gretl installation it may be advisable to delete the old version of gretl before installing the new one.

Installing gretl

1. Click to download either the latest release or the "snapshot". The selected gretl file should appear in your Downloads after a short while. Once the download is complete, minimize your browser window so you can see what's happening on your computer.

2. Double-click on the gretl file in Downloads to open the installer. You should then be walked through the installation process.

3. Navigate to Applications in the Finder and you should now see a gretl icon there. Double-clicking should start gretl. On its first run gretl may take a while to start, as it scans the fonts available on your system. If gretl starts OK, you can drag its icon from Applications onto the dock to get a quick-launcher.

5. Finally, clean up. The installer (pkg) file can be moved to the Trash once installation is completed.

Note on OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and higher: You may find that the OS rejects the installation, or won't let the program run, on the grounds that gretl "was not downloaded from the Mac App Store". This is not hard to fix. There's a good discussion with screenshots here, but just in case that link goes bad here's the short version:

1. Open System Preferences.

2. Under the Personal tab, select the item named "Security & Privacy".

3. Go to the General tab and unlock the menu (the little padlock marked "Click the lock to make changes").

4.Under the section "Allow applications downloaded from" select Anywhere.

Trouble?

Briefly, if you want to debug a non-functioning gretl on OS X, please try this: open a Terminal window and run the following command:

/Applications/Gretl.app/Contents/MacOS/gretl.sh

This should give you some feedback on what is going wrong.

Optional extras

You may wish to install X-13-ARIMA-SEATS and/or TRAMO/SEATS. These are specialized programs for analysis of seasonal time series data, in versions compatible with gretl.