Preparing the Workstation

Before installing McIDAS-X, verify that the workstation is configured to the specifications listed in the table . Then, complete the tasks below.

• Enabling Inter-Process Communication
• Allocating Sufficient Shared Memory
• Creating the /home link on Mac OS X
• Renaming the g77 library on Mac OS X

Enabling Inter-Process Communication

On AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux and Solaris systems (i.e., all except Mac OS X), the system administrator should use the command ipcs to verify that your workstation configuration has Inter-Process Communication (IPC) enabled in the system kernel. If IPC is not running, rebuild your system kernel with all IPC functions enabled.

Allocating Sufficient Shared Memory

McIDAS-X uses shared memory for frame allocation. On AIX, HP-UX and IRIX systems, the shared memory facility is activated by default and has a sufficient maximum segment size for most McIDAS-X sessions. However, this is not true for Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X systems. The system administrator must force the kernel to activate the shared memory system at boot time and set the maximum segment size to 512 MB or greater the first time McIDAS-X is installed on a FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS-X, or Solaris workstation. See Shared Memory Configuration for more detailed information.

Creating the /home link on Mac OS X

Mac OS X systems use /Users instead of /home as on other Unix-based systems. You can create a link from /home to /Users by running the command below.

Renaming the g77 library on Mac OS X

On Mac OS X systems, a collision can occur between the g77 version of the libgcc.a file and the Apple-supplied file of the same name. To resolve the conflict, the system administrator should run the three commands below to rename the file to libgcc_g77.a in the /usr/local/lib/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin7.2.0/3.4.0/ directory and create a link to it in the /usr/local/lib/ directory. Note that the version numbers in the directory path may be different on your system.