iGMT: Interactive Mapping of Geoscientific Datasets

Compatibility issues: Porting iGMT



LINUX

Since iGMT is based on Tcl/Tk and other open source software, porting the program to different hardware platforms (workstation, PC, Mac, Palm Pilot) should be easy. In principle. The reality is more like: Use it on UNIX, doesn't matter what flavor. (The same is actually more or less true for GMT, by the way.)

Many people (including us) like LINUX but we don't use it as a developing platform. Therefore, our favorite shell is still old-fashioned ksh which means that you will have to make small changes to the iGMT sources to run it on your ksh-free LINUX system. However, since ksh is now freely available at kornshell.com, we recommend to install ksh on your system. If you don't want to do that, follow the instructions that were previously described on our 'Problems' page:

Convert all calls to ksh to calls to bash

Here goes our solution from the 'Problems' page:

iGMT korn shell scripts try to call the korn shell using the standard UNIX path "/bin/ksh". Some systems such as SUSE and redhat LINUX have korn shell in a different place such as "/usr/bin/ksh" or not at all installed (J. Oravetz)

Fix: Change the references to the path ksh resides or use a call to bash, which is usually installed on LINUX systems. To do this:

Change every reference to /bin/ksh such as in the first line of the igmt_helper_* scripts ("#!/bin/ksh") to /usr/bin/ksh ("#!/usr/bin/ksh"). Furthermore, change the "shell_to_use" variable in line 69 of igmt_configure.tcl.

If you want to do change path references automatically, try this script we have provided or the elegant perl one-liner

perl -i -p -e s'+/bin/ksh+/bin/bash+g' *
which of course changes every call of ksh to the bash shell. The second approach was provided by E. W. Lisse. Please note that this change of shell binaries can be done automatically from version 1.2 onward using the configure_script.

WINDOWS

Please see our notes on Microsoft Windows page.


iGMT Home

Sep 2001, support@igmtrocks.org