www.neuron.yale.edu

Hello,

I'm trying to get NEURON running on a multi-processor SGI running IRIX64, and running into problems right from the get-go, when I try to compile IV. Specifically, if I untar the iv-17.tar.gz from the Yale website, go into the iv directory and type "./configure --with-prefix=`pwd`", everything goes fine until the console reports:

---------
checking for prototype for gettimeofday... found
checking for type of signal functions... posix
configure: creating ./config.status
./config.status[519]: X/sbin/sed: not found
./config.status[519]: $Xsed: not found
./config.status[519]: X/bin/sh: not found
./config.status[519]: $Xsed: not found
./config.status[519]: Xprint: not found
./config.status[519]: $Xsed: not found
./config.status[519]: Xar: not found
./config.status[519]: $Xsed: not found
./config.status[519]: Xcru: not found
-----------

... and things go downhill from there (I won't post the entire output, as it's extensive, but it's available on request).

This process has worked for previous versions of NEURON, though I can't say for sure that the OS on the machind has not been upgraded since the last time I did this. Has anybody seen this problem? Can anybody offer suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
-Patrick

I have not seen the strange X and $X prefixes before on the SGI or
anywhere else. I'd recommend using the
http://www.neuron.yale.edu/ftp/neuron/v ... -17.tar.gz
version since it has been slightly updated to compile under
gcc-4.0.0 on osx 4 but that seems a longshot for the sgi.
If that machine is not behind a firewall perhaps you can give me
a temporary login on that machine so I can do a bit of diagnosis.

The fix turned out to be twofold:

1.) The first line of the "configure" script needed to be changed to point to the bash shell instead of sh. Apparently when sh was used, some of the echo commands to generate the config.sh script generated incorrect results.

2.) gcc 3.0.3 is too old to build NEURON. An update to gcc 3.3.0 fixed the problem.

Hopefully someone will find this useful.

I did not run into any problem compiling iv-17 (the gcc was already 3.3) but did run into minor problems with compiling NEURON

1. I was unable to compile from source presumably due to antique autoconf etc under IRIX

Solution: downloaded the prepared alpha version
(http://www.neuron.yale.edu/ftp/neuron/versions/alpha/)

2. I was unable to compile in a separate build directory using the configure
--srcdir directive

Solution: used same directory for both source and build

3. readline available as an executable but not as library

Solution: NEURON automatically builds its own readline anyway so no problem here

4. in src/nrnoc make was looking for a "" filename hence
Can't open input file: ./.mod

Solution: 'cp hh.mod .mod'
(creating that empty filename -- sloppy but didn't find the line in Makefile)