HEASoft Supported Architectures & Operating Systems

Quick Links:

• PC:
• OS: Linux
• OS: Cygwin
• Mac
  

• OS: LINUX
  
  Compilers: GNU (v3.1 or higher) or Intel compilers.
  
  Known Issues:
  
  
  • Users who wish to get the HEAsoft pre-compiled Linux binaries should see our note about Perl library portability and should be aware of other portability issues on Linux.
  
  
  
  • readline: Some users may encounter conflicts between their

         /lib/libreadline.so.6
    
      and the one built by HEASoft in
    
         $HEADAS/lib/libreadline.so.6
      

    HEASoft only tries to build its own copy of readline if it is unable to link with -lreadline, and users can help ensure that this test is successful by installing the readline development package (prior to running configure), for example "libreadline-devel", "libreadline6-devel", "readline-dev", etc.
  
  
  
  • Additional packages: The default installation of many Linux operating systems is missing several of the standard prerequisite packages (compilers, libncurses, and the X11 development libraries) needed for building HEASoft. Users may need to install them using apt-get (or other package managers such as "yum") prior to configuring HEASoft (source code distribution):

    
        apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran
        apt-get install libncurses5-dev
        apt-get install xorg-dev
        apt-get install perl-modules
    
        yum install gcc
        yum install gcc gcc-c++
        yum install gcc gcc-gfortran
        yum install ncurses-devel
        yum install libXt-devel
        yum install perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker
      

    Some users may find it necessary to symbolically link (using "ln -s") the libncurses.so.5 library to an unnumbered version in order for the configure test for that library to successfully link against it. For example,

            cd /usr/lib/
            ln -s libncurses.so.5 libncurses.so
      

  • (Fedora) Transparent windows in FV (POW display): When using POW as your display device in the FV GUI, windows may appear transparent. To get around this issue, the graphics "Forced Fallback Mode" should be turned ON (in System Tools -> System Settings -> Details -> Graphics).
  
  
  • (Ubuntu) Transparent windows in FV (POW display): When using POW as your display device in the FV GUI, windows may appear transparent. KDE users should consider switching to GNOME, and when in GNOME, visual effects should be turned off (in System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects).
  
  
  • GCC 4.0.x, 4.1.x: Some mysterious memory faults have been attributed to the early GCC 4.x compiler series (shipped with operating systems such as Fedora 7, 8, 9). The software seems to behave properly when built with newer compilers (4.2.x or newer) or older compilers (3.4.x).
    
    
  • gfortran: The GNU Fortran compiler gfortran is now supported (as of the HEASoft 6.2 release), but only in GNU compiler distributions 4.1.1 or higher. In recent Linux distributions, you may find that your system has gcc / g++ / gfortran 4.x as well as gcc3 / g++3 / g77. Either set of compilers should be sufficient, but we recommend that you avoid mixing compilers from one set with the other, i.e. use a consistent set of compilers to build HEASoft.
    
    We have recently found that - when compiled with gfortran earlier than ~4.2.x - the wmodel command in the QDP plotting program fails when no filename is specified (i.e. a default screen dump). This is evidently a bug in early versions (4.0.x, 4.1.x) of gfortran and is corrected in later versions (4.2.x, 4.3.x).
  
  
  
  • X11: Users may find it necessary to specify the location of their X11 libraries and header files to the configure script. In some newer operating systems, X11 is no longer found in the traditional location (/usr/X11R6/), but lives in /usr/lib and /usr/include instead:

    
        ./configure --x-libraries=/usr/lib --x-includes=/usr/include
    
          or for 64-bit architectures:
    
        ./configure --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib64 --x-includes=/usr/X11R6/include
    
      

  • gcc 3.4.3: The gcc 3.4.3 compiler may fail to link the xspec v12 binary because of a conflict with the linker ld v2.14. Details of the problem are described online HERE. Presumably this problem will be fixed in the next release of the GNU compilers.
  
  
  
  • PERL scripts under Linux RedHat 8 and 9: Users running HEASOFT perl scripts under these platforms may encounter "Split loop" errors. This problem is caused by a bug in the Perl version installed by default with RedHat 8 and 9 which causes it to not function properly with the UTF-8 locale which RedHat made the default starting in release 8. Users should be able to get around this problem by either:

    1) Updating your Perl to v5.8.1 or higher.

    or

    2) Getting rid of the UTF-8 encoding in your shell environment. The environment variables LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG may be used. For example, on GSFC RedHat systems, we do not have LC_ALL or LC_CTYPE set but we do have LANG=en_US.UTF-8, so we "setenv LANG en_US" to fix the problem.

  
  
  Pre-compiled binaries built on:
  i686: Scientific Linux 5.1 - GNU compilers v4.1.2, perl v5.8.8
  x86_64: Scientific Linux 5.2 - GNU compilers v4.1.2, perl v5.8.8
  
  Tested at GSFC on:
  i686: Scientific Linux 5.1 - GNU compilers v4.1.2, perl v5.8.8
  i686: Scientific Linux 4.4 - GNU compilers v3.4.6, perl v5.8.6
  x86_64: Scientific Linux 5.2 - GNU compilers v4.1.2, perl v5.8.8