Experiences installing swarm-1.0.0-solaris.tar.gz

[Nigel Gilbert]

I thought I'd report a couple of hurdles I had to overcome installing
swarm-1.0.0-solaris onto a Solaris 5.5 Sun Ultra-1.  This machine had never
had swarm installed before.  I had assumed from the discussion and docs
that installing the 'binary' version wouldn't also require the installation
of the various supprt libraries; that wasn't quite true.

1.  The distribution unpacks into a directory called swarmbin.  Editing
Makefile.conf wasn't difficult, except it was not entirley clear precisely
which libraries and includes needed to be specified as OTHERLIBDIRS and
OTHERINCDIRS.  An example in the Makefile.conf of a typical Solaris
configuration would have been useful.

2. Doing a make revealed that there was an unsatisfied reference to
X11/xpm.h  I therefore had to download and install the xpm package (in
fact, just the xpm.h header file) before proceeding.

3. I then tried to compile and run the V01 of hello-world.  The first
problem was that the makefile assumed that the swarm distribution was in
../../swarm, when in fact untarring them had put it in ../../swarmbin.
This may seem trivial, but when one isn't quite sure what is supposed to
happen, it can throw you.  I changed thename of the swarm distribution
directory to just swarm.

Running the makefile compiled the code, but failed on loading, becuase it
could not find the X11 library.  It transpired that /usr/lib has
libX11.so.4, but libX11.a was required.  I added a symbolic link to
/usr/openwin/lib/libX11.a, which cured that problem.

4.  I then ran hello-world, which failed, telling me that it could not find
a "usable tk.tcl in /usr/local/lib/tk4.1" (or in a number of other
locations listed in the error message).  It seems that even though tk/tcl
is in the binary distributions, it still needs these packages to be
separately installed.  Our system actually has tcl7.6 and tk4.2 installed,
but not 7.5 and 4.1.
After I had installed these two packages, the hello-world program worked.

Thus I have had to install all the support libraries with the exception of
BLT in order to get the 'binary' distribution to work.

I hope these comments help others to get things going more easily.

_________________________________________________________________________
Prof G. Nigel Gilbert, Dept of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford,
GU2 5XH, United Kingdom.  Tel: +44 (0)1483 259173 Fax: +44 (0)1483 306290