MRG Interactive Developments

Mesoscale Research Group, McGill University

NCAR Graphics Installation on a SunOS(5.8) System with FORTRAN90 Compilers

NCAR Graphics Compile Problems (very minor)

General Information about NCAR Graphics

The best place to get the full story (not to metion source code, mailing lists, and all sorts of other goodies) about the NCAR Graphics package is directly from the NCAR Graphics Homepage. The information given here is specific to installations on our SunOS 5.8 system but is provided in the hopes that it will serve useful to others.

NCAR Graphics Compilation Problems

There were only a couple of (very minor) problems encountered during the build process. The first resulted from the mis-location of the HDF headers, which were installed in the HDF-PREFIX/include directory. During the raster library build (NCARG_HOME/ncarview/src/lib/libncarg_ras), we got repeated error messages:

"hdf.c", line 67: cannot find include file: <hdf/hdf.h>

This problem was solved by creating an HDF-PREFIX/include/hdf directory, and linking the HDF header files into it. No worries there.

The only other problem arose during the construction of the main program binaries, when we started getting repeated undefined symbol references of the type:

Undefined first referenced symbol in file __eprintf /lb4/rmctc/lib/libdf.a(hbuffer.o)


We were building with the native cc compiler, which looks like it must have
been missing the library defining the symbol - the solution for this problem
was to rebuild the binaries using gcc by running:

cd NCARG_HOME/ncarview/src/bin; make all CC=gcc CC_LD=gcc

Again, this seems to have done the trick very nicely, and has produced a
working package on our SunOS 5.8 system.  These problems may be entirely
specific to our platforms, since many of the library and header files
reside in non-standard paths; however, these work-arounds seem to work
a treat if you run into one of these problems.

Graphcap Build Error
The default targets for the .gc files in the common/src/graphcap directory
of the NCAR Graphics package do not build correctly on a Solaris system with
GNU Make, resulting in an error of the form:
No rule to make target `aed.a', needed by `all-local'
followed by build termination in that directory (but not of the
package).  Once installed, the user will have trouble converting metafiles to
postscript using ctrans.  The solution to this problem is contained in the
Graphcap Patch (use left-shift and click to download).
Following the application of this patch (using 'patch -p 0 -b -z .orig <
graphcap.diff'), rerun the configure script in the NCAR Graphics base directory 
and rebuild the package.  Alternatively, you can move to the common/src/graphcap
directory and run 'make local-Makefile' to generate the modified Makefile, then
run 'make all; make install' to install the Graphcap components.  (This latter
method is much faster, but requires more intervention.)







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