[gretl main page]

Step 1: ensure you have X11

To run gretl on PPC, you need to have the X11 window system installed on your Mac. This should be automatic, but if you're using a truly ancient version you may have to go back to the installation DVD to install X11.

How to tell if X11 is installed? Open the Finder and go to Applications. Under Applications, find the Utilities folder, open it and scan to the end: if X11 is installed it should appear there as an icon.

Step 2: install GTK

Some additional libraries are needed to support gretl, namely GTK and friends. Install GTK using gtk2-framework.dmg (or alternate download).

Step 3: install gretl

Now for gretl itself: grab and install either the latest 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).

After downloading, double-click on the gretl dmg file mount the disk image. Open the disk image in the Finder and drag Gretl onto Applications. But note: if you're updating an existing installation of gretl you should first open Applications in the Finder and delete the old Gretl item. Once that's all done you can eject the disk image and delete the dmg file.

Trouble?

The gretl disk image is documented in README.pdf, which contains some suggestions for trouble-shooting. Briefly, if you want to debug a non-functioning gretl on OS X, please try this: open an X11 terminal window; change directory (cd) to Gretl.app (where you installed the package); change directory to Contents/Resources/bin and run the command

./gretl

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

Optional extras

You may wish to install X-12-ARIMA and/or TRAMO/SEATS. These are specialized programs for analysis of seasonal time series data, in versions compatible with gretl.