Compilation

VIEWMOL 2.3 has been written in C. For compilation of VIEWMOL you need a C compiler. TIFF files are supported by the freely available TIFF library which is also necessary to compile the program. It can be found on many ftp sites, e. g. at sgi.com under graphics/tiff/tiff-v3.4-tar.gz. If you want to link VIEWMOL with Mesa instead of with OpenGL you will need Mesa (http://www.mesa3d.org/).

Linux users need Motif to compile and run the program (if the program complains about "viewmol: can't load library 'libXm.so.1'" Motif is missing). Motif is available from http://www.motifzone.org/download/. The Motif clone Lesstif (http://www.lesstif.org/) can be used with Viewmol starting with version 0.81. There are, however, some glitches with Lesstif (e. g. shortcuts don't work).

If you want to recompile the program and you are running one of the supported operating systems (this may be necessary on IBM workstations since the formats of the executables are not compatible between different releases of AIX - don't worry, IBM didn't) you may type make (this tries to build VIEWMOL using OpenGL on all operating systems except on Linux and FreeBSD, to build using Mesa type make viewmol_mesa; make tm bio readgauss readmopac readgamess). The shell script getmachine determines the operating system you are running and sets some options for the compiler. If this does not work you should have a look into the Makefile. The options set are explained there. They are the following:

The getmachine shell script will ask you for the path names to the TIFF and Python libraries and to the include files necessary with these libraries. If you compile with Mesa the script will also ask you for the location of the Mesa libraries and include files. You may specify these path names using environment variables if you put the name of the variable in parentheses (e. g. $(HOME)). These path names are assigned to the LIBTIFF, TIFFINCLUDE, MESALIB, MESAINCLUDE, PYTHONINCLUDE, and LIBPYTHON flags and stored in a file .config.<OS> where <OS> is the output of the uname -s command on your machine. If this file already exists, getmachine does not ask for these path names.

Silicon Graphics compilers on 64-bit operating systems (IRIX64 - R8000, R10000, R12000) will produce a lot of warning messages concerning casts of pointers to integers. These can be safely ignored.

The make procedure will build the program in a directory whose name depends on the operating system and type of CPU you are using. You will find all executables in this directory. After compilation follow the steps under Installation to complete the installation.



Jörg-Rüdiger Hill
Sun Dec 10 17:38:35 MET 2000