Software Prerequisites
The version numbers given here are those in use at time of writing. Later versions should work as well, unless otherwise indicated. Older versions may work, but are not tested.
Our development machines (lofar9/10/cedar/birch) run an up-to-date version of Debian/stable or testing, and most of these packages (with the exception of the ones marked with *** below) are available in Debian and can be installed in a snap with apt-get. Some specific (or patched) versions of packages are available in the Oxford repositories (see Downloading).
As of revision 7155 (15/09/2009), we have completely switched to a Qt4, and a cmake build environment (cmake was actually introduced somewhat earlier, at r6972). The prerequisites have therefore been simplified somewhat. The old dependencies are listed on a separate page: ./OlderVersions.
Prerequisites
A Linux system. Our development machines run Debian/stable or testing with a 2.6.x kernel. Ubuntu will work as well. Generally, any distro listed on the Downloading page should be trouble-free.
Access to our subversion server, lofar9.astron.nl. See ../ActualBuild for details.
- gcc 4.3 or higher. We no longer build or test with older versions of gcc.
- cmake 2.6 or higher.
- casacore, pyrap and either casarest or lwcasaimager.
If you can, install packages from the Oxford repository (see Downloading). This will save you a world of trouble.
Otherwise see build instructions on LinkingWithCasaCore.
- LAPACK3 and BLAS libraries and headers (Debian packages: either lapack3-dev blas-dev, or atlas3-base atlas3-base-dev atlas3-headers atlas3-sse2-dev) will be required by casacore, but the installer should pull them in for you.
- CFITSIO 2.x or 3.x (Debian packages libcfitsio-dev libcfitsio2/3) is required both by casacore and AIPS++ and by Timba. 3.x is preferred.
fftw 3.x (http://www.fftw.org/) (Debian packages: fftw3 fftw3-dev)
Blitz++ 0.8 or higher (http://sourceforge.net/projects/blitz/) (Debian package blitz++). If you build blitz++ from source, please refer to ./BlitzBuildNotes. Note that as of May 2007, the Debian amd64 version of blitz++ (0.9-x) is NOT suitable for building Timba, as it was compiled without the -fPIC flag. You will have to build blitz++ from source if you're running amd64.
Qdbm (http://qdbm.sourceforge.net/) libraries and headers. (Debian packages: libqdbm-dev.)
- Python 2.5 or higher, plus its development headers/libraries (Debian package: python-dev.) NB: older versions (pre-r7155) were compatible with Python 2.4, the latest ones REQUIRE 2.5.
numpy-1.0 (or higher) (http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy) (Debian package: python-numpy)
- Qt 4.4 or higher
PyQt 4.4 (Debian package: python-qt4)
PyQwt 5.1. PyQwt 5.2 is known to have at least one bug (as of Sep 2009). Unfortunately, 5.1 will not build against python2.6+ without some patches. (Also, the package is broken in at least some distros, most notably Ubuntu.) If you want to use python2.6, download python-qwt-qt4 from the Oxford repository, this is a patched version of 5.1 for python2.6. (A further note: the Ubuntu problem appears to have been fixed in Ubuntu 9.10; the Ubuntu supplied package seems to install properly.)
Else you can download the source code from http://pyqwt.sourceforge.net. Instructions for the build are given at http://pyqwt.sourceforge.net/doc5/installation.html#source-code-installation. Be sure to build against the Qt4 widget set.
- pyfits version 2.0 or higher. Version 1.x is known to have problems with python 2.6 (though not with python2.5), yet this is the one shipped with e.g. Ubuntu 9.04. To get around this, the Oxford repository provides a package called python2.6-pyfits.
Python PIL (http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/, Debian package python-imaging).
MPI (optional, for distributed processing). Although MeqTrees can be linked against any of mpich1, mpich2 or openmpi, I suggest using openmpi (http://www.open-mpi.org/) as it seems most user-friendly. Packages are available for many linux platforms.