20010614: Unidata McIDAS-X on FreeBSD

>From:  "Jeff Wilson" <address@hidden>
>Organization:  ABoM
>Keywords:  200106140756.f5E7ujp19614 McIDAS-X FreeBSD

Jeff and Steve,

>I was at a conference last week with Steve Dixon from our Tas office. He is
>interested in getting McIDAS running under freebsd. I think he may have
>already contacted you sometime ago about this. He is interested in what
>changes you added to mccomp and mccar and any memory management changes you
>had to do.

There were several mods made to add support FreeBSD in the Unidata McIDAS
distribution.  For reference, I think that I folded most if not all of these
changes into the SSEC 7.8 distribution (seeing as how I have CVS access
to the code).

>Could you drop us a note with these please.

Here are snippits from the CHANGES.770 file I send out with my McIDAS
7.7 distribution that note what changes were made (there is no real
explanation of the changes, however).

mcar.sh                SSEC 7.70 version with mods
                         don't return error if mcar run with no objects
                         added section for FreeBSD
                         modified ranlib entry for Linux

mccomp.sh              SSEC 7.70 version with mods
                         added sections for FreeBSD
                         modified SSEC sections for Linux
                         added section to trap Sun SC4.0 compilation bug
                         added section to trap Sun SC5.0 compilation bug
                         added passing of loader flag for stripping executables
                           for IRIX and IRIX64
                         commented out the removal of the executable when
                           doing a new link

tclcomp.sh             SSEC 7.70 version with mods
                         added section for DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, and Linux
                           for RUNTIME_PATH

mct_obuf.c             SSEC 7.70 version with mod
                         changed if REGEXEC_STRSTR to
                          if defined(REGEXEC_STRSTR) for FreeBSD

mct_winc.c             SSEC 7.70 version with mod
                         added ifdef to include ncurses.h for FreeBSD

decoder.cp             SSEC 7.70 version with mods
                         changed sigset call to signal for Linux; NOTE: not
                           tested, but decoder is only used for SDI boxes
                         defined MAP_FAILED to be ((void *) -1) for OSF/1
                         included if !defined(__FreeBSD__) with Linux

netcdf/configure       SSEC 7.70 bundled version with mods
netcdf/configure.in      incorporated Plymouth St. (Koermer) mods for FREEBSD
                         Changed occurrances of -Ff2cFortran to -Df2cFortran

argutil.c              SSEC 7.702 version with mod
                         added include of ctype.h in FREEBSD ifdef

I have put the 7.7 modules that were changed for BSD support into the
compressed tar file freebsdmods.tar.Z and put it into the
pub/mcidas/bsd directory of anonymous FTP on our FTP server,
ftp.unidata.ucar.edu.  One should be warned that the modules included
have changes for other reasons in addition to the BSD changes.

Again, one of my objectives was to get the SSEC distribution into shape
for supporting FreeBSD so that sites like TAS can go ahead and build
and run there.  This does not mean, however, that SSEC will be
providing official support for the platform.

>Alternatively I
>didn't end up getting the current user name and password & machine to pick
>up the unidata distribution so he could then do a build of that, or at least
>pick it to bits to see what you have done.

Here is the access information:

machine: ftp.unidata.ucar.edu
user: ...
pass: ...
directory: unix/770
file: mcidasx770.tar.Z

I have started putting together my 7.8 distribution, but it is not yet
ready to go.

>Steve was also the person telling me about the differences between linux and
>freebsd and why freebsd is better. He reminded me at the conference but we
>did not get into detail. It sounded like a popular fast food outlet. Linux
>has a monolithic kernel whilst freebsd doesn't. If I remember what Steve
>said correctly this means that linux can end up with a bottle neck when
>accessing the hardware if things are slow, apparently freebsd doesn;t have
>this problem. I am sure Steve will be able to fill us in on the details if I
>have totally misquoted him :)

These brief comments seem to go along with the general observation that
FreeBSD is faster than Linux.  I have to say, however, that my attempts
at installing and configuring FreeBSD at home were not as successful as
my installations of various versions of RedHat Linux.  This is most
likely due to my growing familiarity with Linux over the past 3 years.

Talk to you later...

Tom