Installing Julia 1.10.5 on a 2011 Mac Pro 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5

General Usage
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Hi, I have a student who has a 2011 Mac Pro with a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 processor. She installed Julia v 1.10.5, but it failed when she tried to run it. She tried the installation using the two alternatives: manually and juliaup.

Does anyone know if installing Julia 1.10.5 on such an old machine is not possible?

Thanks

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I do not know whether Julia works for this laptop in particular but I think it is supposed to work.

Nowadays juliaup is the recommend way of installing Julia. I think there is a chance that juliaup failed due to some things she tried beforehand when she wanted to install Julia manually. I suggest removing all Julia and juliaup related files and trying again. Not sure where they live on Mac - on Linux you just need to delete ~/.julia and ~/.juliaup.

If it still fails, please post the error message or try to describe exactly what you mean by ā€œit failedā€.

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Julia only works in macos 10.14+ or newer.

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Yes, to elaborate you can find the table of supported systems by the latest stable version of julia in the downloads page, and 10.14 is indeed the minimum supported version of macOS, thatā€™s actually a requirement coming from LLVM.

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Here the hardware requirements for different Mac models. The oldest Macs compatible with 10.14 are from 2012, so she is out of luck.

My experience as long time Mac user: Macs have a useful life span of about 8ā€¦10 years - which is not bad. After that software updates getting increasingly problematic.

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Now we know that compatibility is likely the problem, but in the short term a student presumably still needs to get the work done. A short term solution may be to have them check out a cloud-based service like JuliaHub which provides some number of free hours per month for access to a Pluto environment and web-based VS Code (ā€œJulia IDEā€).

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Thanks, everybody. We have installed Julia on pretty old machines, but not this time. I will mark Oscarā€™s entry as the solution because he was the first to provide an answer. Thanks to @giordano for the link. I did not know about it.

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macOS 10.9 was once supported, but Iā€™m not sure itā€™s enough or if even older was supported.

Iā€™m not sure if she can or already upgraded to that version, then you can look unto running on the older Julia version supporting it, or even try down to Julia 1.0ā€¦