Re: Experiences installing swarm-1.0.0-solaris.tar.gz

[glen e. p. ropella]

First off, thanks for the feedback Nigel.  But, let me say
that our solaris binary doesn't yet work correctly.  We didn't
discover this because all our machines here have all the software
installed and that made it hard to verify that it was really 
independent of the system.

So, I apologize to those of you who downloaded the solaris
binary and weren't able to get it to work without a bunch of
heartburn.

We'll send a note to swarm-support when we think we have one 
that works.

> 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.

This is *going* to be true, but isn't yet.  When we finally get
a working solaris binary, it will not be necessary to install
Tcl/Tk, BLT, Xpm, or libtclobjc.  You will, however, have to 
install GCC/Obj-C, X, and GNU Make.

> 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.

We're working on finding a good typical Solaris setup.

> 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.

We will put that in the new binary, as well.

> 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.

Yeah, since the applications are distributed separately from the
distribution, itself, some assumption is made about where the
app will reside with respect to the distribution.  It has always
been the assumption that the apps are in a sibling directory to
the swarm distribution.  But, some people put Swarm in a system
directory (like /usr/local/) and so, it is *always* recommended
that you modify the $SWARMHOME variable in the application 
makefiles to point to where the installation of Swarm is.  Since
you point this out, we'll try to make it more obvious.  We're
really working at making the whole distribution (makefiles, 
source dists, binary dists, etc) more coherent.  So, hopefully,
that will help.

> 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.

You shouldn't need a static X11 library as opposed to a dll.  What
probably happened here is that our binary probably tries to find
a libX11.so instead of a libX11.so.4.  All that's required is a
symbolic link from libX11.so.4 to libX11.so.  (This symbolic link
probably already resides in something like /usr/X11R6/lib/.)


> 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.

Again, we remembered to include the header files for Tcl/Tk but
not the initialization files.  In the next version of the solaris
binary, we will have those initialization files in $SWARMHOME/lib.
And you will need to set the two environment variables (TCL_LIBRARY,
TK_LIBRARY) to that directory.

> 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.

Thanks alot, Nigel!  I'm sorry you had to go through all the pain
of installing everything, especially when we advertised that you
wouldn't have to.  And we'll let everyone know when we have 
what we think is a real binary dist for solaris.

glen