Science Software Branch
Space Telescope Science Institute

Linux

Some of the packages require IRAF to be present on the system. IRAF installation is not discussed in this document. IRAF is maintained by the iraf group at NOAO. For installation instructions or problems, see http://www.iraf.net.

Note: A full installation of the supporting packages is needed, including libraries and header files. On some operating systems the header files may be in a separate package. For example onRedhat they are in the corresponding "devel" rpm package.

If installation from source is necessary, on most systems the following will work:

To unpack a source file:

% gunzip package.tar.gz
% tar -xvf package.tar

· To configure and build a package:

% cd package
% ./configure --prefix=<installation-directory>
% make
% make install

This will create directories bin, lib, include under <installation-directory>. The option "--prefix=" in the above "./configure" command may be omitted for installations in /usr/local.

If you install any of these packages in a personal directory, you will most likely need to change two environment variables:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH <installation-directory>/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
setenv PATH <installation-directory>/bin:$PATH

or set them

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH <installation-directory>/lib
setenv PATH <installation-directory>/bin

It is very likely that Tcl and Tk are already installed on your system. Look in the system directories for files like libtcl.* and libtk.*. PythonTcl/Tk v8.3 or later.

If you have to build these packages from source, build them as shared libraries. On most systems the following set of commands will work for Tcl and Tk:

% cd tcl8.3.5/unix
% ./configure --enable-shared --prefix=<installation-directory>
% make
% make install

Readline

Readline is probably already installed on your system. Make sure the header files are installed as well. A possible location to look for them is /usr/include/readline. In case you need to install Readline in your personal directories, the following commands will install it on most systems:

% cd readline
% ./configure --prefix=<installation-directory>
% make
% make install

Source Installation: Python is available from the python web site at http://www.python.org/ . If Tcl/Tk and Readline libraries are on LD_LIBRARY_PATH or in a system directory, the next three commands are usually sufficient to install Python from source:

% cd python
% ./configure --prefix=<installation-directory>
% make
% make install

To test whether your Python installation has all required modules enabled, try to import the modules as described in Section 1.0.

To build Tkinter, you may need to edit the file Modules/Setup in the Python source distribution, to let Python know where Tcl/Tk and X11 libraries are. Below is an example of this section of the Setup file on Solaris. Note, that some lines are uncommented and the paths on your system may be different.

# The _tkinter module.
#
# The command for _tkinter is long and site specific. Please
# uncomment and/or edit those parts as indicated. If you don't have a
# specific extension (e.g. Tix or BLT), leave the corresponding line
# commented out. (Leave the trailing backslashes in! If you
# experience strange errors, you may want to join all uncommented
# lines and remove the backslashes -- the backslash interpretation is
# done by the shell's "read" command and it may not be implemented on
# every system.
# *** Always uncomment this (leave the leading underscore in!):
_tkinter _tkinter.c tkappinit.c -DWITH_APPINIT \
# *** Uncomment and edit to reflect where your Tcl/Tk libraries are:
-L/usr/local/lib \
# *** Uncomment and edit to reflect where your Tcl/Tk headers are:
-I/usr/local/include \
# *** Uncomment and edit to reflect where your X11 header files are:
# -I/usr/X11R6/include \
# *** Or uncomment this for Solaris:
-I/usr/openwin/include \
# *** Uncomment and edit for Tix extension only:
# -DWITH_TIX -ltix8.1.8.2 \
# *** Uncomment and edit for BLT extension only:
# -DWITH_BLT -I/usr/local/blt/blt8.0-unoff/include -lBLT8.0 \
# *** Uncomment and edit for PIL (TkImaging) extension only:
# (See http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ for more info)
# -DWITH_PIL -I../Extensions/Imaging/libImaging tkImaging.c \
# *** Uncomment and edit for TOGL extension only:
# -DWITH_TOGL togl.c \
# *** Uncomment and edit to reflect your Tcl/Tk versions:
-ltk8.3 -ltcl8.3 \
# *** Uncomment and edit to reflect where your X11 libraries are:
# -L/usr/X11R6/lib \
# *** Or uncomment this for Solaris:
-L/usr/openwin/lib \
# *** Uncomment these for TOGL extension only:
# -lGL -lGLU -lXext -lXmu \
# *** Uncomment for AIX \
# -lld \
# *** Always uncomment this; X11 libraries to link with:
-lX11

Note: The libf2c package at http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyraf/support_stsci_python supports all platforms on which stsci_python is supported. We recommend installing it.

If a source installation is needed, download the package from our web site. It is needed only at compile time but it is worth installing it permanently on the system for future upgrades of stsci_python. The following commands will build it:

% tar xvf libf2c.tar
% cd libf2c
% make -f <makefile.os>

Substitute makefile.os with the correct makefile for your operating system. For example for 64 bit linux operating systems use:

% make -f makefile.linux64

After building libf2c the two files that are needed, f2c.h and libf2c.a, will be located in the source directory. They can be moved to a permanent location. For example they can be copied to /usr/local/libf2c in which case this directory should be used for building stsci_python.

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