How To Get MB-System

The source code for MB-System is available as a compressed tar archive by anonymous ftp to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. This archive file is about 1.2 megabytes in size and, depending on the speed of your internet connection, may take a few minutes to transfer.

Click here to ftp the current compressed MB-System tar archive.

Click here to get point-and-click ftp access to all of the MB-System related files available from Lamont (these may include data examples and beta distributions of MB-System ).

If access through the above links fails, try running ftp from a terminal shell. The following commands represent a typical anonymous ftp session (note that your@email.address literally means to enter your email address).

If anonymous ftp fails with an error message like: "Sorry no DNS entry" after the email address is entered as the anonymous password, this means that the internet address (also called IP address) of the computer in use is not known to the Lamont network to be legitimate. As a security measure, illegitimate IP addresses are not allowed to connect to the Lamont network. The Lamont ftp server attempts to look up or resolve IP addresses using the primary Domain Name Service (DNS) servers associated with the internet as a whole. So, this problem arises when computers use IP addresses are not properly registered with the global DNS servers. This situation sometimes exists for computers connecting through improperly configured firewalls or Network Address Translation (NAT) devices. Users facing this issue can often succeed by running ftp from a "better connected" server in their organization. Otherwise, they will need to contact their internet service provider or their network/computing support staff.

Other Required and Suggested Software and Data

MB-System requires a number of other software packages and databases to be fully functional. These are:

MB-System produces Postscript based graphics. Most current Unix operating systems provide a program which serves as a screen-based Postscript viewer. If you do not have a Postscript viewer, one option is to obtain one of several Ghostscript-based packages from the Free Software Foundation.

Users of MacOs X should note that many of the above packages can be painlessly installed using the fink package available from the Fink Project.

How to Install MB-System

The MB-System source code is extracted by first uncompressing the tar file and then running tar:

This will create a directory called (for the 5.0.1 distribution):

In order to configure your installation, you must edit the shellscript mbsystem-5.0.1/install_makefiles. This is perl script will read template makefiles in the MB-System source directories and create makefiles with the correct attributes. This enables users to install MB-System without having to edit the makefiles. Instead of editing the makefiles directly, the installer should edit this script so that the locations of important libraries and include files are accurate and so that the compile and link flags are correct.

The important parameters to be set in install_makefiles are:

Examples of appropriate values for several different installations (e.g. Sun, SGI, PC) are included in the comments in install_makefiles. To execute install_makefiles, do the following:

Because install_makefiles is a perl script, the executable perl must be available in the installer's path. Once install_makefiles has been correctly configured and run, give the command "make all" to generate the executable programs:

The make command will descend recursively down through the directory structure, compiling source files, linking object files, and copying executables and manual pages to the appropriate directories. The executables will be placed in mbsystem-5.0.1/bin, the libraries in mbsystem-5.0.1/lib, and the manual pages in mbsystem-5.0.1/man/man1.

Naturally, in order for users to use the MB-System utilities, the directory containing the executables must be included in their path (usually this is done by editing the .cshrc file in the user's home directory). The executable perl must also be available in the user's path for most of the macros to work.

Most users will also wish to specify which program they generally use to view Postscript plots on their screen. This parameter can be set either with the mbdefaults program or using the PS_VIEWER environment variable - the former is recommended (see the mbdefaults manual page for details). On Sun workstations pageview is a popular Postscript viewer; on Silicon Graphics machines xpsview is commonly used. Popular open source alternatives to these platform specific programs include ghostview and gv.


Last Updated: $Date: 2006/11/26 09:38:13 $ $Revision: 5.16 $

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