Questions about the GH installer

Hi,
I’m preparing a set of instructions for a class. I’m wondering about a couple of things that i’ll be glad to know:

  1. Does the GH installer works also for Mac computers? I’m not a Mac user. In case the installer is good for Mac, is there any minimal configuration needed (as for OS, etc)?
  2. Does the installer, and LBT at all, works for Non-Ascii accounts (user names)?

Will appreciate your pointers here.
Thanks,
-A.

From my teaching experience, neither LBT nor installer works with Asciii accounts

Thanks @ZhengrongTao
I kind of remember that the ascii issues were solved recently … but i’m not sure if that appplies also for user accounts.

Edit: This discussion states that non-scii account names are allowed. Right?
If so, it leaves the Mac question still open.

-A.

Hey @AbrahamYezioro ,

Sorry for not responding to this sooner. The installer.gh that you download from Food4Rhino works on both Mac and Windows and you might remember that there are installation instructions for both. However, the single-click Pollination Grasshopper installer, which includes the LBT plugin (and that you can get for free here) is Windows-only at the moment. So just remember to use the Food4Rhino installer if you need something that works for both operating systems.

As for usernames with non-ASCII characters, @ZhengrongTao 's response is the correct short answer.

The longer answer is that we’ve actually managed to get almost all of the plugin to work for usernames with non-ASCII characters. The only part that really doesn’t work is OpenStudio and I have been in discussions with NREL about how we can support this. Granted, you’d probably never get to this step of realizing the plugin mostly works with non-ascii characters because the Food4Rhino installer currently fails when it’s run from a username with non-ASCII characters.

I plan to make some changes to the Food4Rhino installer in the next stable release. If I’m able to find a means of running OpenStudio with non-ASCII characters, then I’ll make the Food4Rhino installer able to work for non-ASCII usernames. If not, then I’m at least going to improve the message to make it clear the installation isn’t good because of non-ASCII characters. Depending on how badly people want to run the plugin without OpenStudio, maybe I’ll just make this a warning (allowing the installation to proceed) rather than an error (stopping the installation process, like what happens now).

In any event, the recommended way to do it right now is to just have your students make another account on their machine with all ASCII characters and run the Food4Rhino installer from there. That will always work on both Mac and Windows.

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Thanks @chris,
It is clear now. I’m planning to use the free installer since that will make the whole thing smoother, for me and for them.
I will warn about non ASCII accounts.
Thanks again,
-A.

I should clarify that both the Food4Rhino installer and the single-click Pollination Grasshopper Installer are FREE. We announced that the Pollination Grasshopper installer is “forever free” in January.

The only difference is that, for one, you have to make a Food4Rhino account and, for the other, you have to make a Pollination account. And, the Pollination single-click installer is currently Windows-only as I mentioned.

So this means that it’s not clear which one you are referring to when you say “the free installer.” I also can’t really tell which one “makes it smoother” since, if everyone is using Windows, the single-click installer is definitely going to be smoother. I imagine that you have Mac users among your students, though, so I guess you’re probably going with the Food4Rhino route.

Oh no, I’m going with the one-click option. 80-90% use Windows. For the Mac many install beforehand a Windows environment.
We will mange better this way.
Thanks @chris!
-A.

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