Please read before posting: Help us help you!

Posted on
Picture of user. AdminRobK Joined: 01/24/2014
If you are posting to ask for help with installing OpenMx, please understand that it is difficult for anyone to help you out if you don't provide a few key pieces of information! We therefore ask that your post include, at minimum, the following:

  1. Your operating system and architecture (e.g., "x86_64 Linux").
  2. The version of R you're running.
  3. A description of what goes wrong when you attempt installation, including the actual text of any warning or error messages you might encounter.

A simple way of providing #1 and #2 above is to simply include the output of OpenMx's `mxVersion()` in your post.

Thanks in advance!

Replied on Fri, 04/08/2022 - 10:45
No user picture. dfinkel Joined: 04/06/2022

1. operating system: Macbook Pro 2020 M1 chip
2. R version 4.1.3 (2022-03-10)
3. error messages:
Error in runHelper(model, frontendStart, intervals, silent, suppressWarnings, :
NPSOL is not available in this build. See ?omxGetNPSOL() to download this optimizer

> omxGetNPSOL()
Getting OpenMx from http://openmx.ssri.psu.edu/.
You are now installing the latest version of OpenMx, compiled with NPSOL, that is available for R-4
Error in install.packages : Updating loaded packages

Restarting R session...
> install.packages(pkgs = c("OpenMx"), contriburl = contrib.url(repos, type = type), dependencies = NA, verbose = TRUE)
Warning in install.packages :
unable to access index for repository https://openmx.ssri.psu.edu/software/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1:
cannot open URL 'https://openmx.ssri.psu.edu/software/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1/PACKAGES'
Warning in install.packages :
package ‘OpenMx’ is not available as a binary package for this version of R

A version of this package for your version of R might be available elsewhere,
see the ideas at
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-patched/R-admin.html#Installing-packages

Replied on Fri, 04/08/2022 - 13:49
Picture of user. AdminRobK Joined: 01/24/2014

In reply to by dfinkel

What seems to be happening is that `omxGetNPSOL()` is trying to find a directory in our software repository that matches what R reports your platform to be, 'big-sur-arm64'. The problem is, we don't have such a directory, because we've never built NPSOL for macOS running on 64-bit ARM. You could try manually downloading the x86_64 macOS build of the most recent OpenMx release from here, and try installing it as a local .tgz file. But, that will only work if you have installed the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer (which lets you run Mac programs compiled for x86_64 on Apple's M1). And even then, it will probably only work if your installation of R was also compiled for x86_64. I don't know for sure--I'm not a Mac user.

You're the first person to ask us about using NPSOL on this new platform. I don't know when we'll have an M1-compatible macOS binary of NPSOL.

Replied on Mon, 04/11/2022 - 05:47
No user picture. dfinkel Joined: 04/06/2022

In reply to by AdminRobK

NPSOL seems to be "called" when I use the miFunctions.R set of functions created by Hermine. If, instead, I paste the relevant functions into the program code instead of calling the whole document [e.g., commenting out #source("miFunctions.R")] then the program runs - now I have start value problems, but it appears the code is running.