Installing XGAP should be easy once you have installed GAP itself. We assume here that you want to install XGAP in its standard location, which is in the ``pkg'' subdirectory of the main GAP4 installation.
You have to perform the following steps to install XGAP:
3.2 What you need to install XGAP
Being a graphical user interface to GAP, XGAP of course needs
graphics. At the moment this means that you need the X window system in the
Version 11 Release 5 or newer. So you cannot use XGAP on a Macintosh
or a Microsoft Windows computer. On the other hand the type of Unix you use
should not matter. Please contact Max Neunhöffer (email:
max.neunhoeffer@math.rwth-aachen.de) or post to the gap-trouble
mailing list, if you encounter problems with certain system configurations.
Because XGAP contains a C-part you need a C compiler.
3.3 Getting and unpacking the sources
You can download the sources from the same places as GAP. So the main FTP servers are:
ftp://ftp-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/pub/gap/gap4/ ftp://ftp.math.rwth-aachen.de/pub/gap4/ ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/mirrors/ftp-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/pub/gap/gap4/ ftp://pell.anu.edu.au/pub/algebra/gap4/
You need only one file with the name ``xgap4r11.zoo''
which is in the subdirectory for the share packages.
When you installed GAP you used the utility unzoo to unpack the
distribution. You will need this here again. See the GAP-manual for
instructions on how to get and compile this.
You now change your current directory to the pkg subdirectory of the
location where you installed
GAP (you typed an unzoo-command, then a new directory called
``gap4'' or something like that was created, this directory contains
the pkg subdirectory). The standard location would be:
# cd /usr/local/lib/gap4/pkg
Now you extract the sources for the XGAP share package:
# unzoo -x xgap4r11.zoo xgap/README -- extracted as text xgap/Makefile.in -- extracted as text xgap/configure -- extracted as text xgap/configure.in -- extracted as text xgap/init.g -- extracted as text xgap/cnf/Makefile -- extracted as text xgap/cnf/Makegap.in -- extracted as text xgap/cnf/Makegap.top -- extracted as text xgap/cnf/config.hin -- extracted as text xgap/cnf/configure.in -- extracted as text xgap/cnf/configure.out -- extracted as text xgap/doc/answers.tex -- extracted as text xgap/doc/diffgap3.tex -- extracted as text /bin/mkdir: cannot make directory `xgap': File exists ...
Note that the warning is not serious.
The unzoo utility unpacks the files and stores them into the apropriate subdirectories. XGAP resides completely in the following subdirectory (assuming standard location):
/usr/local/lib/gap4/pkg/xgap
3.4 Configuring and Compiling the C part
You have to change your current working directory to the ``xgap'' subdirectory. You do this by
# cd xgap
if your current working directory is the one, where you used unzoo. There you invoke the configure script by:
# ./configure creating cache ./config.cache checking for make... make checking host system type... i686-unknown-linux2.0.34 checking target system type... i686-unknown-linux2.0.34 checking build system type... i686-unknown-linux2.0.34 checking for gcc... gcc checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works... yes checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) is a cross-compiler... no checking whether we are using GNU C... yes ... updating cache ./config.cache creating ./config.status creating Makefile creating xgap.sh
¼ indicate omissions. This script tries to determine, which kind of operating system and libraries you have installed and configures the source accordingly. Normally this should produce some output but no error messages. The last step of the script produces some makefiles which are used to compile the code. You do this by typing
# make
if test ! -d bin; then mkdir bin; fi
if test ! -d bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.34-gcc; \ # line broken for this manual!
then mkdir bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.34-gcc; fi
cp cnf/configure.out bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.34-gcc/configure
( cd bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.34-gcc ; CC=gcc \ # line broken for this manual!
./configure --target=i686-unknown-linux2.0.34 )
creating cache ./config.cache
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works... yes
checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) is a cross-compiler... no
checking whether we are using GNU C... yes
...
creating ./config.status
creating Makefile
creating config.h
make[1]: Entering directory \ # line broken for this manual!
`/usr/local/lib/gap4/pkg/xgap/bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.34-gcc'
gcc -I. -g -O2 -I/usr/X11R6/include -o xcmds.o -c ../../src.x11/xcmds.c
gcc -I. -g -O2 -I/usr/X11R6/include -o utils.o -c ../../src.x11/utils.c
...
make[1]: Leaving directory \ # line broken for this manual!
`/usr/local/lib/gap4/pkg/xgap/bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.34-gcc'
(a few lines were broken for typesetting purposes in this manual, the position is marked by a backslash)
Now all C sources are compiled and a binary executable is built. It is stored in a subdirectory of the ``bin'' subdirectory in your ``xgap'' directory. The name of this location has something to do with your installation. It could for example be
bin/i686-unknown-linux2.0.34-gcc/xgap
if you compile on a Linux system using the GNU-C-Compiler.
3.5 Installing the Startup Script
To make the startup of XGAP more convenient there is a startup script
which contains also some configuration information like the position of
your GAP installation. It is in the ``xgap'' directory
and is called ``xgap.sh''. This file is automatically generated
by the configure script and normally you should not have to change
anything in it. Just copy it to some location that people have in their
``PATH'' environment variable, for example to ``/usr/local/bin''.
This completes the installation.
If you want to change anything in the installation, you can also edit the script until the line
## STOP EDITING HERE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can specify the directory where GAP is installed (``GAP_DIR''), the amount of memory that GAP should use as initial workspace (``GAP_MEM''), the name of the GAP-executable (``GAP_PRG'') and the name of the XGAP-executable (``XGAP_PRG''). The first three are exactly the same things that you could edit in the main GAP startup script. After that you have the possibility to control the behaviour of the XGAP startup script. You can specify whether XGAP goes into the background (``DAEMON'') and whether it prints out information about its parameters (``VERBOSE''). Note that it is possible to combine ``DAEMON=YES'' and ``VERBOSE=YES'' because the script actually runs in the foreground and only the C program is put into the background.
3.6 Installing in a different than the standard location
It could happen that you do not want to install XGAP in its standard location, perhaps because you do not want to bother your system administrator and have no access to the GAP directory. In this case you can unpack XGAP in any other location within a ``pkg'' directory with the unzoo command as described above. Let us call this directory ``pkg'' for the moment. You get an ``xgap'' subdirectory with all the files of XGAP in it. You follow the standard procedure with two exceptions:
Before you can configure and compile XGAP you need a symbolic link ``cnf'' which is in the directory where ``pkg'' is and points to the ``cnf'' directory in the main GAP directory. You can install this link directly after unzooing by (remember: you are in the ``pkg'' directory!):
ln -s /usr/local/lib/gap4/cnf ..
if ``/usr/local/lib/gap4'' is the location of the main GAP installation.
You can find out where the main GAP4 installation is by starting
GAP as usual and looking at the variable GAP_ROOT_PATHS
within GAP.
Note that you have to edit the startup script ``xgap.sh'' (see previous section) to adjust the paths for ``XGAP_DIR'' and ``GAP_DIR'', and possibly the name of the GAP executable ``GAP_PRG''. Enter your GAP installation directory for the variable ``GAP_DIR'' and the name of the directory that contains ``pkg'' for the variable ``XGAP_DIR''. The variable ``GAP_PRG'' has to contain the path to the GAP executable relative to the ``bin'' subdirectory of the main GAP installation. In most cases this value will already be correct. Note however that if GAP and XGAP are compiled on different machines, then it is possible that these directory names differ for the GAP and XGAP executables respectively.
The script will automatically launch GAP with two directories as library path such that all GAP and XGAP libraries will be found.
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XGAP manual