Table of Contents

  1. Supported Platforms
  2. Installing Prerequisites
    1. RPM (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora)
    2. dpkg/apt (Debian, Ubuntu)
  3. Details for Specific Platforms
    1. Red Hat / Centos 5 / Fedora
    2. RHEL 4
    3. Debian/Ubuntu
    4. SuSE/Open SuSE

Installing the LSST Software Stack on Linux

This page describes the prerequisites for installing the LSST software stack on Linux, along with any platform-specific instructions. The main directions can be found at Installing.

Supported Platforms

While we try to maintain platform-specific information on all Linux platforms on this page, only certain distributions considered "supported". By supported, we mean that these are the platforms where we regularly test the stack and actively try to fix problems. These platforms currently include:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (64/32-bits)
  • CentOS 5.2 (64/32-bits)

If you have experience installing the stack on other platforms and are aware of problems/solutions for them, we encourage you to share them on this page

The official C/C++ compiler is the GNU GCC-G++ compiler (version 4.1.X), though we plan to support other as well (like the IBM compileers).

Installing Prerequisites

Below we list the software packages which must be installed prior installing the LSST software stack. This is usually done through the Linux OS's native package manager. There are a few commonly used package manager (e.g. yum/rpm for Red Hat, and apt-get/dpkg Ubuntu and Debian). These packages typically require administrative (i.e. root) access to be installed. This section outlines some survival commands to assess what you have installed and to install the missing bits. After this section, we list the specific packages you need to ensure are installed.

RPM (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora)

To see if a particular package is installed use the command, rpm -q package, as in... 

% rpm -q gcc-c++
gcc-c++-4.1.2-42.el5

If a package is not installed, this command will return: 

package gcc-c++ is not installed

The easiest way to install a package is with yum: 

% yum install gcc-c++

After checking your system and with the server, it will ask you to confirm the installation before proceeding; answer with a y.

dpkg/apt (Debian, Ubuntu)

To see if a particular package is installed use the command, use dpkg --status package, as in... 

% dpkg --status g++
Package: g++
Status: install ok installed
...
Original-Maintainer: Debian GCC Maintainers <debian-gcc@lists.debian.org>

If a package is not installed, this command will return: 

Package `g++' is not installed and no info is available.
Use dpkg --info (= dpkg-deb --info) to examine archive files,
and dpkg --contents (= dpkg-deb --contents) to list their contents.

The easiest way to install a package is with apt-get: 

% apt-get install gcc-c++

Details for Specific Platforms

Do you see omissions to a list below? If so, please update the list or contact David Gehrig (gehrig at ncsa.uiuc.edu).

Red Hat / Centos 5 / Fedora

Required packages to be installed by the OS:

  • gcc-c++ - GNU C++ compiler
  • subversion - software repository interface tool
  • gcc-gfortran - GNU Fortran
  • autoconf, automake, libtool, m4, make - the GNU build tools
  • flex, bison
  • libXt-devel - X11 libraries and includes
  • ncurses-devel
  • patch
  • zlib-devel - compression library headers
  • e2fsprogs-devel - ext2/ext3-specific headers; provides UUID for ActiveMQ
  • readline-devel and termcap-devel

This line should install them all:

yum install zlib-devel readline-devel e2fsprogs-devel libtool ncurses-devel libXt-devel m4 gcc-c++ gcc-gfortran flex bison

RHEL 4

Installation of LSSTPipe works normally on 32-bit RHEL WS Release 4 (Nahant Update 6) using gcc 3.4.6.

Debian/Ubuntu

Required packages to be installed by the OS:

  • g++ - GNU C++ compiler
  • subversion - software repository interface tool
  • autoconf, automake, libtool, m4, make - the GNU build tools
  • flex, bison
  • libx11-dev
  • libncurses5-dev
  • libreadline5-dev
  • patch
  • libuuid1 (or uuid), uuid-dev
  • tetex-extra, latex2html (these two LaTeX-related packages are required for the EUPS build)
  • libxaw-headers for Ubuntu 8, or libxaw7-dev for Ubuntu 9 - for X11/Intrinsic.h, needed for tcl/tk, also required for xpa
  • graphviz
  • libz1g-dev

SuSE/Open SuSE

Required packages to be installed by the OS:

  • gcc, g++
  • subversion - software repository interface tool
  • autoconf, automake, libtool, m4, make - the GNU build tools
  • e2fsprogs-development
  • ncurses-devel
  • xorg-x11-libx11-devel