Following the README for building?

[Tiho]

Hi,

I'm trying to build FreeMat(3.6 first to get used to it) under
opensuse10.3, and I'm using the README file that describes the
process.

Is that file still actual? It is using as example FreeMat 1.0. Are
all thoese steps valid?
(e.g. there's no configure script there - I run 'bootstrap', but that
was just a guess).

After bootstrap, if I run the ../configure step, the message is:
---------
One or more of the required external dependencies was not found.
Please
install the missing dependencies (as listed above) and rerun
configure.
---------

How to get those libraries with their correct version? Isn't there
some automated step to get them (to ensure that the right version and
config is used)?

Or is the README useless? If so what other document details step by
step what to do?

Thanks,

Tiho.

[Timothy Cyders]

Can't speak directly to opensuse but when I've built in other distros, it's just been ./configure, sudo make, sudo make install, so long as all the dependencies and libraries are already installed and linked. The process for Ubuntu was stated pretty succinctly in Chuong's first post in this thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/freemat/browse_thread/thread/e03d7a096efc47c9/19be48b80a9a552a?lnk=gst&q=unable+to+install+freemat#19be48b80a9a552a

Hope this helps!
TJ

[jdav...@tx.rr.com]

I successfully built & installed from source on a Debian machine a
while back; I kept some notes while I was doing it. Here's my $0.02,
anyway:

My notes from building...

- Qt (from source) is freely available from TrollTech; it takes a
*LONG* time to compile,
but for me it was "./configure, make, make install" However, on Linux
at least, supplying
the "--with-qt4dir=/usr/local/TrollTech/Qt4" didn't work. Instead, I
had to configure
pkg-config correctly, which the Qt install doesn't do by default. I
just did this:

# cp lib/pkgconfig/*.pc /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

and FreeMat was happy. Well, for a second anyway.

I also had to add /usr/local/TrollTech/Qt-4.3.4/bin to my $PATH, so it
could find "moc"
(some sort of Qt-specific precompiler, I beleive).

- You need g77. I downloaded gcc-2.8.1 and g77-0.5.23, merged them
and it compiled OK. Note;
I wasn't required to downgrade gcc - I'm still running gcc 4.4 for C,
but I also have g77
available.

- The README refers to a "--with-miniblas" configure option. This
doesn't work (in fact,
isn't referred to anywhere in the configure script).

- For BLAS (required by FreeMat), I found "ATLAS" (recommended by the
FreeMat) documentation.
I tried (and tried, and tried, and tried) to get this to work with
FreeMat, but I never
got past configuration. I'm sure I'm missing something, but after two
days, I gave up on Atlas.
The problem was always that FreeMat's configure couldn't find the
required function "sgemm_",
which wasn't built by any Atlas build I could come up with.

Instead, I used the slower (according to the README) fortran reference
implementation at
http://www.netlib.org/blas/blas.tgz and the LAPACK from netlib. This
seems to work - and for
what I need, it's fast enough to keep me happy.

my final configure call was:

./configure --with-blas=/home/jdavies/projects/math/BLAS/blas_LINUX.a
--with-lapack=/home/jdavies/devl/projects/math/lapack-3.1.1/
lapack_LINUX.a

After that, it was a simple make && make install to get it working.

(I did have to add /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.3.4/lib to my
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, too).

[Samit Basu]

Hi,

Great write up. Please consider posting it on the wiki.
Incidentally, the ATLAS problem is that you need to build the fortran
compatibility libraries. These are the ones that contain sgemm_.

Samit