[Contents] [TitleIndex] [WordIndex

Compilation of Scilab Under Solaris x86

These instructions describes how to build Scilab 5.x under Solaris x86 using gcc. They are known to work with Opensolaris 2008.05 but any recent enough distribution of Solaris or Opensolaris should work.

Compiler

gcc/g++ 4.0 or higher is required in order to compile Scilab with at least version 4.2 of gfortran. Version 3.4.3 only of gcc is available through the IPS and gcc 4.0.2 is available from blastwave wich are not sufficient. Until a recent version of gcc become available it will have to be build from the source distribution. This has been tested using gcc 4.3.2 built from source in 32 bits mode.

Dependencies

For a complete list of dependencies please refer to Dependencies of Scilab 5.X.

Important note : Any package can either be installed using pre-built binaries, if available, or compiled manually. For any compiled package be sure to specifies the build triplet for any of these packages. This is done by giving the --build directive to the configure script like this :

./configure --build=i386-pc-solaris2.11

Failure to do this could results in packages that cannot be linked together on some 64 bits machines. Also some configure scripts are broken and do not detect the build machine correctly which will results in some cryptic compilations errors.

Scilab's requirements

Some of the dependencies of Scilab are available in the Prerequirements bundle from the download page. To simplify things some of theses files are needed but only from the thirdparty folder. It's important that this is done before some of the steps below and exactly as specified. From the prerequirements bundle only the thirdparty folder is important and must be extracted in the source folder of Scilab everything else should not be extracted. Some of the files in the thirdparty folder will be overwritten by some steps below this is normal.

XML library

The package SUNWlxml, available from the IPS, provides libxml2 and the necessary headers to build Scilab.

PCRE Library

PCRE version 7.4 is distributed trough the IPS but version >=7.6 is recommended to build Scilab. Source version is available at ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/. Building PCRE is straightforward and simply requires the usual steps. i.e.

./configure --build=i386-pc-solaris2.11
make
make install

ncurses

http://www.blastwave.org provide the ncurses library version 5.5. Refer to the blastwave how-to for instructions on how to install packages from blastwave. Optionaly it can instead be built easily from the source version available from the gnu ftp http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses/.

Numerical libraries

Theses instructions assume that the internals libraries from the Scilab source distribution are used. It has been reported that linking to the Sun Performance Library is possible.

Tcl/Tk

Package SUNWTk from the IPS provide the necessary TCL/Tk headers and libraries.

Java

Java, JDK and Ant are all required to build the Scilab GUI and can be fetched from the IPS. The packages names are : SUNWj6rt, SUNWj6dev and SUNWant.

JOGL

A Solaris build of JOGL is available from the JOGL website https://jogl.dev.java.net/. Make sure to download the 32 bits build. Extract all the .jar files from JOGL inside the thirdparty folder in the Scilab source directory overwriting those already extracted from the prerequirements bundle. Next, take all the .so libraries of JOGL and place them into the bin directory of the Scilab source.

Flexdock, Jrosetta, commons-logging

All these are provided by the prerequirements bundle.

Docs, Scicos and Matio

Instructions for theses modules are not available yet.

Configuring and building Scilab

Finally scilab can be configured and built. Note that VPATH build is not working at the moment. This mean that scilab must be configured and built from it's source folder else it won't work. So configure Scilab as follow :

./configure --build=i386-pc-solaris2.11 --without-matio --without-ocaml --without-scicos --enable-build-localization

If some libraries are not installed in the default search directories they must be specified in the configurations. For example the following configure options are available where you input the directory where the libraries resides :

--with-pcre=
--with-libxml2=

By default Scilab will be installed in the /usr/local directory. If you want to change this use the --prefix=/installpath option in the configure command.

The next step is to build Scilab simply by typing :

make

Then if all went well (need root privileges if installing in /usr/local) :

make install

This should have installed a working build of Scilab 5 on Solaris.


2022-09-08 09:26