Ncurses support is only required if you intend installing one or both of the mse or emnu EMBASSY packages. These instructions should be followed if your system does not provide Ncurses, either by default or as optionally installable components. For example, all common Linux distributions do provide these components on the distribution DVD or CDs; MacOSX also bundles Ncurses in its distribution. Most other operating systems (e.g. IRIX and Solaris) either do not, but Ncurses can usually be downloaded precompiled from freeware sites or installed from a companion CD distributed with the operating system. Unfortunately, such freeware has been known to be less than rigorously tested by the hardware companies and you may find that you have no option but to compile the libraries yourself from source code.
Before compiling Ncurses support yourself, read any operating system specific notes for your machine in this chapter.
Do a final check to see whether your system already has Ncurses installed.
a) On Linux RPM based systems type:
rpm -q ncurses |
rpm -q ncurses-devel or just |
rpm -qa "ncurses*" |
both the library and development packages should be shown. If not then install the relevant RPMs from your distribution DVD or CDs.
b) On Linux Debian based systems type:
dpkg -list libncursesw5 |
dpkg -list libncursesw5-dev |
both should give a positive response. If not then install the relevant deb files from your distribution DVD or CDs.
c) On other Unix systems look in any system library directories (those named lib or lib64 depending on your system) for files called libgd.so and ncurses.h. A command that will usually find these files would be:
find /usr -name libncurses.so -print |
find /usr -name ncurses.h -print |
If the files are not found in a standard system directory then it's recommended you compile your own for use with EMBOSS.
Get the Ncurses source code
This can be downloaded from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ncurses/. This example assumes that version 5.7 is being used. Always use the latest version. See the current versions section of this chapter.
In a temporary directory type:
gunzip ncurses-5.7.tar.gz |
tar xf ncurses-5.7.tar |
rm ncurses-5.7.tar |
cd ncurses-5.7 |
Compile Ncurses:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local |
make |
make install |
This will install the library and development files under the /usr/local directory tree.
Delete the Ncurses source code:
cd .. |
rm -rf ncurses-5.7 |