How To Get The MB-System Source Distribution

The source code for MB-System is available as a compressed tar archive by anonymous ftp to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. This archive file is about 3 megabytes in size and, depending on the speed of your internet connection, may take a few minutes to transfer.

Click here to ftp the current MB-System release as a compressed tar archive.

Click here to get point-and-click ftp access to all of the MB-System related files available from Lamont (these may include data examples and beta distributions of MB-System ).

If access through the above links fails, try running ftp from a terminal shell. The following commands represent a typical anonymous ftp session (note that your@email.address literally means to enter your email address, and that many modern ftp clients do not require the "binary" command).

If anonymous ftp fails with an error message like: "Sorry no DNS entry" after the email address is entered as the anonymous password, this means that the internet address (also called IP address) of the computer in use is not known to the Lamont network to be legitimate. As a security measure, illegitimate IP addresses are not allowed to connect to the Lamont network. The Lamont ftp server attempts to look up or resolve IP addresses using the primary Domain Name Service (DNS) servers associated with the internet as a whole. So, this problem arises when computers use IP addresses are not properly registered with the global DNS servers. This situation sometimes exists for computers connecting through improperly configured firewalls or Network Address Translation (NAT) devices. Users facing this issue can often succeed by running ftp from a "better connected" server in their organization. Otherwise, they will need to contact their internet service provider or their network/computing support staff.


Access MB-System Source Version Control System
The MB-System source code is archived and managed using Subversion, an open source version control system. The MB-System and MB-Cookbook Subversion repositories can be browsed through a web interface at:
http://svn.ilab.ldeo.columbia.edu/
 
The MB-System repository is at:
http://svn.ilab.ldeo.columbia.edu/listing.php?repname=MB-System
The entire repository, or individual files, can be downloaded through this web interface. Clicking the the link above to bring up the WebSVN interface showing the most recent revision to the MB-System code base, along with a list of paths including "branches", "tags", and "trunk". To download the entire code base, click on the "Download" link to the right of "trunk". To browse the structure and download individual files, click on the "trunk" link. Users can build MB-System using this downloaded code base, but should note that the repository stores a number of files that are not included in the MB-System distributions.


Packaged MB-System Distributions

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Shipboard Technical Support group maintains a repository of open source software RPM distributions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Linux. This repository includes both source and binary distributions of MB-System, GMT, and netCDF that can be accessed using the yum utility. The MB-System RPMs require the GMT and netCDF RPMs, but have no other external dependencies. This repository can be found at:

The SIO-STS gpg signing key is

MB-System is included in Poseidon Linux, the "Scientific GNU/Linux". Poseidon is an Ubuntu Linux based distribution including a selection of open source software packages intended to support scientific research. In particular, it offers several specific tools in the areas of GIS, 3D Visualization, Mathematics, Statistics and several other fields of research.

MB-System has been packaged for MacOS X as part of the Fink Project. The MB-System fink package is maintained by Kurt Schwehr of CCOM/JHC UNH.


Other Required and Suggested Software and Data

MB-System requires a number of other software packages and databases to be fully functional. These are:

MB-System produces Postscript based graphics. Most current Unix operating systems provide a program which serves as a screen-based Postscript viewer. If you do not have a Postscript viewer, one option is to obtain one of several Ghostscript-based packages from the Free Software Foundation.

Users of MacOs X should note that many of the above packages can be painlessly installed using the fink package available from the Fink Project.


How to Install MB-System

The MB-System source code is extracted by first uncompressing the tar file and then running tar:

This will create a directory called (for the 5.3.1955 distribution):

In order to configure your installation, you must edit the perl script mbsystem-5.1.3/install_makefiles, and set a number of parameters to reflect the system architecture, the location of the installation, and the locations of certain required libraries. This script will read template makefiles in the MB-System source directories and create makefiles with the correct dependencies, compile flags, and link flags. The important parameters to be set in install_makefiles are listed below. The install_makefiles script includes comments suggesting parameters to use for many common computer systems.

These parameters must be set for all installations:

These two parameters are required to build the graphical tools mbedit, mbnavedit, mbvelocitytool, mbnavadjust, mbgrdviz, and mbeditviz. If these parameters are not both set, no graphical tools will be built.

This parameter must be set to build the openGL tools mbgrdviz and mbeditviz:

This parameter must be set to build the sonogram calculation program mbsegypsd:

This parameter must be set for the tidal modeling program mbotps to work:

This optional parameter can be used to specify a non-default C compiler:

These optional parameters can be used to specify linking with an independent installation of the PROJ4 library. In this case, the PROJ4 library included with MB-System will not be built.

These optional parameters can be used to specify linking with an independent installation of the GSF library. In this case, the GSF library included with MB-System will not be built.

To execute install_makefiles, do the following:

Because install_makefiles is a perl script, the executable perl must be available in the installer's path. Once install_makefiles has been correctly configured and run, give the command "make all" to generate the executable programs:

The make command will descend recursively down through the directory structure, compiling source files, linking object files, and copying executables and manual pages to the appropriate directories. The executables will be placed in mbsystem-5.1.3/bin, the libraries in mbsystem-5.1.3/lib, and the manual pages in mbsystem-5.1.3/man/man1.

Naturally, in order for users to use the MB-System utilities, the directory containing the executables must be included in their path. Altering the user path variable is generally accomplished by editing the initialization files hidden in the user's home directory. Which files need to be edited depends on which command line shell is being used. If the user works with csh, then the .cshrc and .login files need to be changed. If the shell is bash, then the .bashrc and .profile files must be altered. See the manual pages for the relevant shell program to determine how to set the user environment. The executable perl must also be available in the user's path for most of the macros to work.

Most users will also wish to specify which program they generally use to view Postscript plots on their screen. This parameter is set with the mbdefaults program (see the mbdefaults manual page for details). Popular open source options for Postscript display include ghostview and gv. The postscript plots can also be imported into proprietary tools like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat, or Preview on MacOs X. On old Unix machines, pageview worked well on Sun workstations running Solaris, and xpsview on on Silicon Graphics machines running Irix.


Last Updated: $Id: mbsystem_how_to_get.html 1955 2012-05-16 23:06:52Z caress $


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