[Swarm-Support] Installing under Gentoo Linux

[Carlos Castillo]

Hello,

I've been trying to install Swarm (cvs) under Gentoo Linux for a couple of
days now, and I have more or less succeeded, however I'm having problems
getting an application to work. Some developers and/or users might find this
information useful.

Here's what I have done and the issues I've had to deal with:

-Installed the required software (blt2, libpng, xpm, hdf5, zlib, libffi,
kaffe, etc). Verified the software worked correctly. Note that there is not
a list of packages needed for the development version available at the web
page, I used the list of software available at the stable version page.

-Checked out the cvs version after trying the latest stable and failing
miserably to install it on a reasonably current Linux system.

-./autogen.sh, generates some syntax errors in the configure script, I just
deleted the problem areas and all went well

-./configure had problems working with kaffe (which I later came to know
was no longer required, but it wasn't mentioned explicitly anywhere), I
switched to sun-jdk and all went better.

-make initially failed in the tools directory, where I had to compile a
couple of source files manually because of missing headers, it couldn't
find some required headers. Unless up to this point I have done something
wrong, everyone compiling the development version should be running into
this problem.

-make failed intermitently a couple of other times after that over similar
things in that directory, but in the end all was built

-finished the compilation

-make install failed, with some problem with java files... however it did
finish the basic things

-tried to compile some samples, the makefiles for the samples reflect
another file layout. It may be result of not being able to do the make
install, but I don't think so. Tweaked the makefile. It compiled but
it didn't run. I had to go to the directory where blt was installed and to a
symlink from bltGraph.tcl to graph.tcl (I'm using the latest stable of BLT).

-I ran heatbugs, and another couple of other examples (also downloaded from
cvs).

I compiled an old Swarm application developed by a colleague (it was
developed in windows during 1999-2000). After some minor tweaking it
compiled. I'm able to run it. But when I start the simulation it aborts on
the abort() in the line 633 of DefObject.m.

After reading the code a bit I think the thing has to do with COM but I
don't know exactly what. I went to the COM directory of the swarm tree,
and tried to make it and it said it all ok. I went to the COM/c directory
and it nothing was built and it started asking for the mozilla directory
(apparently it uses XPCOM). I couldn't get it to compile, although I
included /usr/include/mozilla/ and /usr/lib/mozilla/ and the like.

Now my questions:

what does it mean when a software aborts on DefObject.m in line 633?

under linux, does the COM directory have to be built?

how do I do this, knowing I expanded the mozilla 1.6 tree and did not get
any results?

And my comments:

I have never used Swarm, however I have only heard good things about it.
Unfortunately there are two options for a new user:

-The stable version which seems very very old and in practical terms is
unfeasible to install from source on a modern linux distro.

-The development version, which at least as far as I've seen looks very
sloppily put together and has some bizarre problems.

Best regards,

Carlos Castillo