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Re: Does activating 8 disable 7?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg113928] Re: Does activating 8 disable 7?
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 07:06:01 -0500 (EST)

On 11/17/10 at 5:27 AM, siegman at stanford.edu (AES) wrote:

>If I install and activate Mathematica 8 on the new MacBook Pro
>(only), will that somehow disable or deactivate the copy of
>Mathematica 7 that's been left behind on the old MacBook (both Macs
>talk to our household WiFi LAN)?

No. I currently have both version 8 downloaded and installed
last night and version 7 both installed on the same MacBook Pro
I use with no problems running either.

The only thing I am seeing that might be an issue with some
third party packages is there is a difference between what is
returned by version 8 and version 7 for by $LicenseID. In
version 8, this returns my license ID as expected. In version 7,
this returns the activation code used for version 8 which seems
to be my license ID with and additional set of characters
appended. Any third party package that checks this variable on
version 7, in my case likely will not run correctly.

However, this should not be a problem in your case since you
indicated you would be running both versions on separate
machines. In that case, there will not be a shared directory and
version 7 should not get confused by the version 8 activation system.

>Or will it maybe just block one of them from starting up any time
>the other is running?

No. I can run both version 7 and version 8 at the same time on
the same machine. Both version behave as independent
applications. The only issue is as I pointed out above. Also,
running both version as I am doing means both see the same
init.m file etc. So, you *may* need to be careful modifying this
file after installing version 8. But these type of issues can be
addressed by putting in a check for the version prior to prevent
running code appropriate for one version when the other version
is launched.



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