[Ifeffit] Fresh installations of linux and ifeffit

[Bruce Ravel]

Hi folks,

This message is partly in response to Norbert's post from last week and
partly because I noticed some things today that may trip up others in my
situation.  I wanted to post something here so that the solution to a
similar problem might be found in the mailing list's archive.

Yesterday and today I have been entertaining myself by updating my
desktop computer to SuSE's Office Desktop edition of SuSE 8.1  It's
pretty nifty and the installation was a breeze.

Installing Ifeffit and my programs was not a breeze, however, because of
some issues related to a linux distribution with a name like "Office
Desktop".  Because this distribution is targeted at people who use
office applications, it was pretty weak in terms of software
development.  I had to go to SuSE's online distribution to get rpms for
such obviously necessary things as C and Fortran compilers and make!

Once I installed all the obvious development stuff, I made a stab at
compiling Ifeffit.  I immediately saw the problem that Norbert reported,
which was the configure script complaining about not being able to find
the "tputs" function in any of the terminal libraries.  I solved this
problem by downloading and installing the ncurses development package. 
SuSE and Red Hat give names like "ncurses-devel" to these packages,
which contain header files and the like.

After that, no problem.  Ifeffit compiled up just fine.  As did Athena
and Artemis.  However, trying to start Athena it became obvious that I
had forgotten to install PGPLOT.  Matt's PGPLOT_install script did it's
magic exactly as expected.  However, to get the compilation of PGPLOT to
finish, I had to install the development packages for the PNG, zlib, and
X windows libraries.  Again, my "Office Desktop" system was lacking the
header files needed to compile software.  Once those were installed,
PGPLOT compiled fine.  I recompiled Ifeffit and my codes and I was
happy.

To summarize:

1.  Don't forget to install PGPLOT.

2.  If you have a choice about which linux distribution to choose, go
for one of the "professional" distributions and make sure to install
development packages up front.

3.  If your CDs did not have the development packages on them, go to
your vendors website and download them.  If you ever want to compiler
other stuff from the web, you will want these anyway.

4.  To compile Ifeffit and PGPLOT, you need the header files for 
      --  ncurses (or whichever terminal library you have on your
          system)
      --  the PNG library
      --  the zlib library
      --  the X windows headers

Hope that's helpful to someone sometime.
B

-- 
 Bruce Ravel  -----------------------------------
ravel at phys.washington.edu
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