Installing Charm in Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon

[Marcos Portnoi]

1. I would like to share my experience in installing Charm 0.43 beta. I attempted installing it on Windows 8.1 and MinGW, but that was not successful.
   

I compiled the following report which might be useful to other people.

Background

• Attempting to install Charm by way of its Windows installer fails: "Python version(s) 3.3 / 2.7 not found, the installation will now abort. I have python 3.4; it seems the installer looks for the very specific version 3.3.
• Attempting to install Charm under MinGW from source fails, even after all dependencies are met.

Therefore, I opted to install Charm to Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon under a VMWare virtual machine.

Install subversion:

sudo apt-get install subversion

Install m4:

sudo apt-get install m4

Upgrade Python 3 (very latest version) and other stuff (there will be some questions about upgrading: I selected  the one mentioning "package maintainer"):

sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Python3 header files/static library:

sudo apt-get install python3-dev

Install libssl-dev:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Install flex:

sudo apt-get install flex

 

Install bison:

sudo apt-get install bison

 

Install GMP per site:

download package

cd gmp-6.0.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

 

Install PBC per site:

cd pbc-0.5.14
./configure
make
sudo make install

 

I chose to use Anaconda Python, which includes the Spyder IDE. Thus, download and install Anaconda to the local user. After downloading, execute the shell:

bash Anaconda-2.x.x-Linux-x86_64.sh

 

Download Charm to /home/<username>

Let's install Charm to both the system python3 and Anaconda Python.

Install to system python3:

sudo bash ./configure.sh --python=/usr/bin/python3
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

And then install Charm to the locally installed Anaconda Python3.
Start from clean download of Charm (do not use the previous downloaded Charm directory, as some configuration was already done there, and I could not research how to clean up properly):

delete the previous downloaded and unzipped charm directory, used to install Charm to the system python3.

unzip charm directory to local user again.

bash ./configure.sh --python=/home/<username>/anaconda3/bin/python3
make
make install

Result:

• Spyder runs example in ABE successfully.
  
• Both system python3 and Anaconda python3 seem to be working.
  

Issues:

The system python3 does not run all examples of Charm appropriately (in particular, the ABE examples). For some weird reason, not all Charm libraries are installed under /usr/lib/python3.

To fix this issue:

Copy all charm libraries under anaconda to /usr/lib/python3:

sudo cp -r /home/<username>/anaconda3/lib/python3.4/site-packages/Charm_Crypto-0.43-py3.4-linux-x86_64.egg/charm   /usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages

Install pyparsing to system python3:

(to get easy_install3)

sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools
sudo easy_install3 pyparsing

Result:

• Both system python3 and Anaconda python3 run Charm examples.