If all you want to do is run AIPS, you're much better off doing a 'binary install'. I did this because I want to do some hacks later. Note that I did a 'text install', which is much more elaborate. This was also a process of some trial and error, of which I present here none of the sweat and the gory backtrackings, so be suitably grateful! ('Unexpected pass'? Is that a good or a bad thing?) I decided just to try to build AIPS and see how that went.

However I have no clue how to interpret the output. I got hold of dejagnu, expect and tcl like the gnu people recommend before running any test sets, then tried

gcc-4.2.1/configure -prefix=/usr/local/gcc-4.2.1 -disable-multilib -enable-languages=c,c++,fortran # download the tar file gcc-4.2.1.tar.gz to ~/src/gnu/ # This may be unnecessary, since I later ended up disabling multilib.Įxport LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu # install libgmp-dev and libmpfr-dev via the synaptic package manager - I'm sure I could have used apt-get like the real linux hebos, but the SPM interface makes things just that bit more user-friendly. I'm just going to list the actual steps I took here without going into the whys and wherefores. In fact I had a number of problems, googled about them, and adjusted the default build instructions accordingly. I had problems building the java compiler, so in the end I just chose to build the c, c++ and fortran compilers. Gcc has several compilers, not all of which one needs to build AIPS. The version already installed on the laptop was 4.6. (See the GNU gcc home page.) I chose version 4.2.1. So the first task is to build one of the 'AIPS-approved' versions of gcc. So I created an account named aipsmgr and did all the following steps from that account.ĪIPS is a little fussy about the version of gcc it builds with. I wanted to build AIPS not as me, but under a separate account. The laptop is a Toshiba something or other, 64-bit. I also found this astronomy blog helpful. Here are some notes which record how I got AIPS to build on my laptop.

Ai ps