[Developers] Installing Opendtect

[Bert Bril]

Hi all,

I read Fidel's installation problems. First of all, I have to say that
this is not something for the developer's list. It's not a user's list
problem either, it's much better to send such specific things to
support at opendtect.org.


Anyway, some background on the installation may be interesting for
developers. OpendTect installs in a rather old-fashioned way on
UNIX-like systems. The advantage is that it's easy to see what is
happening, so sysadms can simply check what's going on and don't need to
guess whether we're screwing things up. Another advantage is that the
install script is so easy that things can be done 'by hand' in no time.
Just untar-gzip the package(s), go into the new opendtect-2.x directory
and type './setup.od'. You can always run the setup.od script, for
example if you rename the installation directory.


Now for Fidel's problem:

> I traid to install the stable versión of ODT 2.4 in a suse linux machine
> with 64 bits.
> 
> I downloaded the package with extension .tar.tar, but the script
> “install_od” required a file ended with “.tar.gz”, however I renamed the
> package, and thing went well.

This is weird because all packages you can download on UNIX-like systems
have the extension '.tar.gz'. I have no idea how the file can end up
getting the .tar.tar extension, but it is certainly something we have no
control on. Have you downloaded on M$ Windows?


> Next I went to the bin directory in order to execute opendtect. The file
> to do this was “start_dtect”, but it complained that the files it
> required was in  a directory named lux and not lux64, and I renamed that
> directory to lux.

I can imagine you want to get things working quickly but on the other
hand, you may start scratching your head that everyone else obviously
doesn't have this problem. Stopping at this point, re-thinking or
getting support is probably the thing to do.


> /FS04/petrofisica/frramos/opendtect-2.4/bin/lux/SearchODFile: Exec
> format error. Binary file not executable.
> 
> /FS04/petrofisica/frramos/opendtect-2.4/bin/lux/SearchODFile: Exec
> format error. Binary file not executable.
> 
> /FS04/petrofisica/frramos/opendtect-2.4/bin/lux/odmain: Exec format
> error. Binary file not executable.

And now things are getting clear: we are not on 64-bits Linux! This is
32-bits Linux for sure. What happens is:

* start_dtect calls the od_exec script
* od_exec panics when it sees no 'lux32' subdirectory.
* As a last resort, it tries a directory 'lux'
* Because of the rename of lux64 to lux, the script is happy
* But the executables are 64-bits executables which won't run on 32-bits
machines.


All in all we need to think twice before fiddling around to get
installations working. It should work 'out-of-the-box'. If not: can it
be a local problem? When you are really puzzled: indeed it may be a bug
and then we are very glad to hear about it at opendtect.org.

The same goes for add-on packages with plugins. I installed a package
with plugins from ArkCls a few days ago, it was super-easy and it worked
immediately (after I installed the license of course). That's how it
should be.


/Bert

-- 
-- Bert Bril / OpendTect developer at dGB
-- Nijverheidstraat 11-2, 7511 JM Enschede, The Netherlands
-- mailto:Bert.Bril at opendtect.org , http://opendtect.org
-- Tel: +31 534315155 , Fax: +31 534315104