Today I installed the Staden Package on Tanja's Macintosh G4 computer (MacOS 10.3). I recommend using the ebiotools package made by Anders Nister. It includes other useful software such as EMBOSS, Blast, etc.). Installation instructions are available in the embnet news issues 9/1, 9/2, 9/3 and 10/1 or gathered into one pdf file from here.

I have installed Staden on MacOS X and have been playing around with it. I used the ebiotools package created by Anders Nisters described in issue 10/1 of the embnet.news for the installation. It works, although not according to the Mac philosophy:

Macs don't have a BIOS. They have something called Open Firmware instead. So the BIOS password is called Open Firmware password. You boot into Open Firmware by pressing the command (=apple), option, O and F keys simultaneously during system boot. To set the password type password To enable the protection type setenv security-mode full An then reboot by typing reset-all Apart from the full security mode you can also set "none" (= don't ask password during boot) and "command" (=gives you only limited access to Open Firmware without the password.

fdisk is not really able to read the partition table that the Macntosh installer writes. To figure out what you have you can e.g. use the Yast partiitoning tool. mount -t ufs -o ufstype=openstep -o ro /dev/sda3 /media/misc

1. Save all sequences in one flatfile format (NOT MacVector format), e.g. genbank format.
2. Copy all sequences to a Linux/UNIX computer and convert them from Mac format to UNIX format: mac2unix *.gb
3. Write all sequence fiule names into one file: ls *.gb > oligo.lst
4. Convert all sequences into one file of concatenated fasta entries using EMBOSS: seqret -sequence @oligo.lst -osformat fasta. Call the output file "mcbl_oligo_db"
5. Put this fasta file into the blast web servers database directory (.../blast/db)
6. Format the database: formatdb -i mcbl_oligo_db -p F -o T