The Official ODE instructions for compiling on Mac OS (even Linux) are pretty useless. Their wiki and instruction files included with the source code contains 'generic' instrcutions that list at what worked years ago. It frustrates me that their entire project becauses useless on one platform because it takes an inner knowledge of ODE's development process in order to get the damn thing to build.

Macports doesn't install ODE correctly either. Macports installs a PPC binary on your system (even if you have an Intel Mac). So here is the correct way to compile ODE on a Mac.

Download the ODE Source Code from Sourceforge.

Extract the source (Click here for the full article...)

Install Bullet (Download Link):

cd bullet-2.75/
cmake . -G "Unix Makefiles" -DBUILD_EXTRAS=on -DBUILD_DEMOS=on -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
make

Pretty simple. The demos will be built to bullet-2.75/demos/ and the Bullet libs are built to bullet-2.75/src/

1. Install Bullet (Download link):

You need to do a little bit of hackery on Mac OS X in order to get Bullet to build properly. (I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6). I have installed Bullet into /lib/bullet-2.75/

First, you need to get the (Click here for the full article...)

Official instructions are here, but this method worked for me:

install these packages with synaptic: (Click here for the full article...)

The aim is to document commonly useful configurations and settings that you should consider applying when you get a new Mac or perform a reinstall.
Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions you think should be added.

Disable .DS_Store file creation for network connections.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true