[daip] Aips and Red Hat Linux 7.1

[Patrick P. Murphy]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2001 17:18:32 +0100 (BST), Ian McHardy
   <imh at astro.soton.ac.uk> said: 

> We are running Aips (Dec 2000) on a nice fast 1.4 GHz pentium 4, running
> Red Hat 7.0 but we bought a big monitor and the graphics card doesn't
> work properly.

Is your X server by any chance set to use 16 bit depth?  You can tell by
looking at /etc/X11/XF86Config (or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 if you're running
version 4 of XF86; Red Hat 7.1 does, can't recall if 7.0 does or not).  At
the end you'll see a screen section, and if it says DefaultDepth 16, you
are using 16 bits per pixel in your X server.  AIPS Can't handle that; it
needs either 8, 24, or 32.

If it's a case that XF86 itself refuses to work with the old card (and I'd
be somewhat surprised, especially if you've got the 4.x version thereof),
then of course no amount of messing with this config file will help.

> So (if I remember the story correctly from our computer manager) we need
> a new card. However the new card won't work with Red Hat 7.0 so we have
> to upgrade to the new 7.1 version.

> Question: does anyone know (or have good grounds for suspicion) about 
> any problems with Aips running under Red Hat 7.1?

If you're going to build AIPS from scratch on it, you MUST do so with an
older (stable) version of the GNU compilers.  Red Hat has provided an
experimental "snapshot" compiler with both RH7 and RH7.1 ("gcc 2.96").
AIPS, while it will build fine with gcc/g77 from this version, will not
run correctly (more specifically, IMAGR and some other tasks won't work).

To do the "right" thing on RH7.1, you either need to use pre-built
binaries for 6.2 (I *think* this will work; Eric will correct me if I'm
wrong) or you need to do this:

    1) get the 2.95.3 compiler gcc/g77 tarballs from ftp.gnu.org
    2) unpack them somewhere
    3) configure --prefix=/usr/local   (or some other destination)
    4) make; make install
    5) Modify $SYSUNIX/FDEFAULT.SH, $SYSLOCAL/CCOPTS.SH and
       $SYSLOCAL/LDOPTS.SH to refer to /usr/local/bin/g77 and gcc
    6) run install.pl (step 5 above can be done after install.pl unpacks
       the tarball but before it starts the INSTEP2 compile).

This is not really as hard as it seems; the GNU software builds very
nicely and smoothly on Linux.  The catch is to make sure it does NOT
build or install it in /usr/bin and /usr/lib.

HTH.
				- Pat
-- 
  Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.                   Division Head, CV Computing, NRAO
  Home: http://www.chien-noir.com/      Work: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/
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