This way of setting up is the more difficult one, but is recommended for production environments. If you just want to try out GeoServer on a Mac, see Binary Package Install#MacOSX

These are some notes if you are trying to use Geoserver on Mac OS X.

I have Geoserver up and running in a Mac OS X server Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 Processors with 4GB of RAM and is working really smooth.

First of all there is a difference if you are using simple Mac OS X or Mac OS X server. The second one comes already with a Java servlet container installed called Tomcat/JBoss. The normal Mac OS X I think does not bring any.

So if you have the simple Mac OS X then it is probably better to install Tomcat as many users in the geoserver mailing list use it and can help you in case of problems.

If you are using Mac OS X server then you can

1) Use the existing Tomcat/JBoss application server.

2) Stop the running Java servlet container using the Server management application (check Application Server) and use Tomcat or Jetty or something else.

I will explain here how to use the Tomcat/JBoss application server, but maybe some of this hints will help you when using Tomcat.

I am new to the Java world more or less so maybe some of this steps were not necessary, but any case I hope it will help.

–

1) Start by downloading Geoserver. I downloaded the WAR file that you can find in deployment.

2) I tried to use the Tomcat/JBoss administration panel and did not succeed in installing Geoserver, well, I managed to do it, but every time =I restarted the server the configurations were gone.
So I manually uncompressed the geoserver.war into a folder called geoserver.war. This is suppose to be done automatically by the application server, but in my case if I don't do it my configurations get lost every time the server is restarted.
So, you have downloaded the war file, you have unzip it (a war file is just a zip file with .war extension) into a folder called again geoserver.war

3) Move this folder to your "/Library/JBoss/3.2/deploy/" folder.

4) Go to the file "/Library/JBoss/3.2/bin/run.conf" and in the line where JAVA_OPTS are set use this line:

JAVA_OPTS="-server -Dawt.headless=true -Xmx100M $JAVA_OPTS -Djboss.server.temp.dir=$JBOS

I just added the

-Dawt.headless=true

to the options.
This is because it seems that there is no x-server runing on Mac OS Server by default. Adding this line avoid the need to run one. There are some more details at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/awt/AWTChanges.html#headless
If you don't set this you will get very strange errors when requesting images using WMS.

5) If you go now to the server manager and restart the Application server this should take effect. But in my case when starting the Application server from the server manager it does not take effect So I had to manually run the application server using "/Library/JBoss/3.2/bin/run.sh".
If anybody manage to make this work using the server manager please let me know!

Go to http://localhost:8080/geoserver/ and hopefully geoserver will be already working.

Things that I did not managed:

• Set up Tomcat/JBoss to run trough apache so geoserver is accesible trough port 80
• Connect to MySQL 5 from Geoserver. I always get an error when is trying to stablish the connection.

Good luck!
--Javier de la Torre.