Mac OS Snow Leopard tksurfer display problem

See also: TksurferDisplayProblems

The X11 that is installed with Snow Leopard seems to cause display problems in tksurfer. Specifically, the display looks like this:

The fix for this is to install the latest XQuartz, v2.6.1 or later, for Snow Leopard. Prior to doing that, the existing X11 install should be removed. Open a Terminal and type:

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Launch*/org.x.* /Applications/Utilities/X11.app /etc/*paths.d/X11
sudo mv /usr/X11 /usr/X11-original-install
sudo pkgutil --forget com.apple.pkg.X11DocumentationLeo
sudo pkgutil --forget com.apple.pkg.X11User
sudo pkgutil --forget com.apple.pkg.X11SDKLeo
sudo pkgutil --forget org.x.X11.pkg

Now, get XQuartz for Snow Leopard. Once you've downloaded and installed the dmg file, it will be installed in the /opt/X11 directory. So to complete the installation, open a Terminal and type:

cd /usr
sudo ln -s /opt/X11
sudo ln -s X11 X11R6
cd /Applications/Utilities
sudo ln -s XQuartz.app X11.app

Now tksurfer should display surfaces properly. However, there is one more step to perform. The first time you try tksurfer, it will seem to hang. In Finder, you need to goto Applications->Utilities and open XQuartz. Upon opening, then tksurfer should finish opening. If it doesnt, then you might have to logout then login again. After this one time operation of opening XQuartz, then tksurfer seems to open correctly from the Terminal after that w/o having to explicitly open XQuartz.

If you run into a problem where libXp.6.dynlib cannot be found, you might try doing this:

cd /usr/X11/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/X11-original-install/lib/libXp.6.dylib
##sudo ln -s libXext.6.dylib libXp.6.dylib

If symbolic linking doesn't work, physically copy the file from the backup X11 directory to the X11 directory

sudo cp /usr/X11-original-install/libXp.6.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libXp.6.dylib