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Unidata McIDAS-X - Supported Platforms

Supported Workstations

Unidata McIDAS-X and -XCD have been successfully built at the UPC on platforms listed in the following table. McIDAS-XCD has been tested at the UPC on two of these platforms, Sun Solaris SPARC 5.9 and Fedora Core 5 Linux.

NOTE:

SSEC recommends that McIDAS-XCD be run on 32-bit versions of Linux. Experience at the UPC has shown that there may, in fact, be a problem running -XCD on 64-bit versions of Linux (we run Fedora Core 5). The problems we are seeing are decoders stop writing output data files (both MDXX and GRID) after a certain period of time, typically a couple of days. This failure is currently being investigated.

Vendor	Operating System(s)	Compilers
Apple	MacOS-X 10.4 (Darwin)	g77, gcc(1)
FreeBSD Project	FreeBSD 4.9	gcc, f77(4)
Hewlett Packard(3)	HP-UX B.11.11	Vendor f77, cc 11.11.16 gcc, g77(5)
IBM(2)	AIX 5.1	Vendor f77, cc gcc, g77(5)
RedHat(2)	Fedora Core 5,6(3)	gcc, g77, gfortran(6)
Silicon Graphics	IRIX64 6.5	Vendor f77, cc gcc,g77(5 )
Sun	Solaris x86 5.10	Vendor f77, cc; Versions SC5.0+ gcc, g77(5)
Sun(2)	Solaris SPARC 2.[6-9]	Vendor f77, cc; Ver sions Sun Studio 11/12 gcc, g77(5)

1. MacOS-X has been successfully built using GNU gcc version 4.0, g77 version 3.4.3, and the distribution of X windws packaged with MacOS-X 10.4.

2. We believe that Unidata McIDAS-X will build and run successfully under AIX 4.[23], Fedora Core [34], Enterprise WS 3,4, and Solaris 5.[45] but we have no way of testing this.

3. In the v2006 release notes, SSEC announced cessation of support for HP-UX beginning with McIDAS-X version 2007. Unidata followed suit and decided to drop support for HP-UX in Unidata McIDAS. SSEC has extended support on HP-UX through 2009 due to Australian Bureau of Meteorology needs. Unidata has not built McIDAS-X/-XCD v2007 on HP-UX. We are deferring to SSEC's judgment of its viability.

4. cc under FreeBSD is a link to GNU gcc; f77 is GNU g77 but there is no link identifying this fact.

5. Use of GNU gcc and g77 is the only non-vendor compiler combination supported.

6. Use of GNU gcc/g77 and gcc/gfortran are the only compiler combinations supported.

NOTEs:

• We recommend the use of the Gnome desktop environment under any Linux distribution. Tests at Unidata and SSEC continue to show that other desktops, such as KDE, will not display the McIDAS-X image window correctly or will exhibit a memory leak that will render the workstation unusable after McIDAS has been running for several days.

• Unidata McIDAS-X version 2006 was the last distribution of Unidata McIDAS supported on Compaq Tru64 Unix (aka OSF/1).

Workstation Requirements

• 1 GB RAM minimum; more is always better
• 2 GB swap minimum; more is recommended
• 128 MB shared memory minimum; >=512 MB recommended
• 5 GB disk (operating system and McIDAS-X distribution only; data storage requirements can vary up to many GB)
• X Window System (X11R5/X11R6 compliant)
• 32-bit color displays
• Keyboard and three-button mouse
• TCP/IP Ethernet

Software Requirements

1. Fortran and C compilers: We recommend the Free Software Foundation's GNU gcc and g77. GNU gfortran support will be made available in a v2007 addendum.

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