[gmx-users] Gromacs Installation troubles

Jussi Lehtola jussi.lehtola at helsinki.fi
Tue Nov 18 17:34:45 CET 2008


On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 01:46 +1100, Mark Abraham wrote:
> > Jussi - I'm trying to compile the packages myself since the pre-made 
> > RPM's don't seem to install the libraries needed. Furthermore, the LAM 
> > RPM would constantly complain about not being able to find gcc-g77 - a 
> > package found in CentOS4 but not CentOS5 (it's now referred to as 
> > compat-gcc-34-g77 - the names don't agree so rpm complains). 
> 
> So that's why you can force RPM to do things when you do happen to know 
> better that it does.

Forcing RPM to do things it shouldn't do is not a very bright idea. Also
never trust RPMs you found somewhere on the internet, often they do very
stupid and unsafe things.

RPMs in e.g. Fedora are quite safe, since they adhere to a strict
package policy, which is controlled.

Anyway, when there are already built, guaranteedly safe RPMs for your
distribution, please use them.

Besides, LAM has been obsolete for some years now, you should use
OpenMPI instead, which implements e.g. full MPI2. And you can find LAM
also already in the distribution, you just have to install the lam-devel
package to be able to compile against it.

> >I've found that it's often much less of a headache if you 
> > can find the source and start from scratch (this is the FreeBSD child in 
> > me talking). 

Not really, since that way

a) you have no idea what software has been installed and where
b) upgrading software is a pain in the ass

If you use the distribution packages you don't have to worry about
anything.

Compile software yourself *only if* you want to use some proprietary
compiler (e.g. Intel), or you want to use some switches in the
compilation the RPMs haven't been compiled with. And even if you do
compile stuff yourself, it's often easier to take the SRPMs and edit the
spec file to make it use the compiler & options you want it to instead
of manually compiling & installing the software from the source tar
files.
-- 
------------------------------------------------------
Jussi Lehtola, FM, Tohtorikoulutettava
Fysiikan laitos, Helsingin Yliopisto
jussi.lehtola at helsinki.fi, p. 191 50623
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Mr. Jussi Lehtola, M. Sc., Doctoral Student
Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, Finland
jussi.lehtola at helsinki.fi
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