E.3 Unix installation instructions

To install SINGULAR on a Unix platform, you need the following two archives:

Singular-2-0-4-share.tar.gz

contains architecture independent data like documentation and libraries (alternatively, you may also download Singular-2-0-4-share.zip).

Singular-2-0-4-<uname>.tar.gz

contains architecture dependent executables, like the SINGULAR program.

<uname> is a description of the processor and operating system for which SINGULAR is compiled (e.g, ix86-Linux). Please contact us if you can not find an appropriate architecture dependent archive.

You can obtain these (and other) archives from

ftp://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/pub/Math/Singular.

To install SINGULAR

Make sure that you have approximately 12MByte of free disk space and follow these steps.

1. Simply change to the directory in which you wish to install SINGULAR (usually wherever you install 3rd-party software), for example:

   cd /usr/local or mkdir install;cd install (you do not need root privileges in this case)

   SINGULAR specific subdirectories will be created in such a way that multiple versions and multiple architecture dependent files of SINGULAR can peaceably coexist under the same /usr/local tree.

2. Unpack the archives:

   gzip -dc <path_to>/Singular-2-0-4-<uname>.tar.gz | tar -pxf - gzip -dc <path_to>/Singular-2-0-4-share.tar.gz | tar -pxf -

   This creates the the directory Singular/2-0-4 with

   (sub)directories	which contain
   <uname>	Singular and ESingular executables
   LIB	SINGULAR libraries (*.lib files)
   emacs	files for the SINGULAR Emacs user interface
   info	info files of SINGULAR manual
   html	html files of SINGULAR manual
   doc	miscellaneous documentation files
   examples	SINGULAR examples (*.sing files)

   For the executable to work, the directory layout must look pretty much like this; the executable looks for "sibling" directories at run-time to figure out where its SINGULAR libraries and on-line documentation files are. These constraints on the local directory layout are necessary to avoid having to hard-code pathnames into the executables, or require that environment variables be set before running the executable. In particular, you must not move or copy the SINGULAR executables to another place, but use soft-links instead.

The following steps are optional:

• Arrange that typing Singular at the shell prompt starts up the installed SINGULAR executable.

  If you have root permission, do:

  ln -s `pwd`/Singular/2-0-4/<uname>/Singular /usr/local/bin/Singular-2-0-4 ln -s `pwd`/Singular/2-0-4/<uname>/ESingular /usr/local/bin/ESingular-2-0-4 ln -s /usr/local/bin/Singular-2-0-4 /usr/local/bin/Singular ln -s /usr/local/bin/ESingular-2-0-4 /usr/local/bin/ESingular

  Otherwise, append the directory `pwd`/Singular/2-0-4/<uname>/ to your $PATH environment variable. For the csh (or, tcsh) shell do:

  set path=(`pwd`/Singular/2-0-4/<uname> $path)

  For the bash (or, ksh) shell do:

  export PATH=`pwd`/Singular/2-0-4/<uname>/:$PATH

  You also might want to adjust your personal start-up files (~/.cshrc for csh, ~/.tcshrc for tcsh, or ~/.profile for bash) accordingly, so that the $PATH variable is set automatically each time you login.

  IMPORTANT: Do never move or copy the file Singular/2-0-4/<uname>/Singular to another place, but use soft-links instead.

• If you wish to use any of following features of SINGULAR, make sure that the respective programs are installed on your system:

  Feature	Requires
  running ESingular, or Singular within Emacs	Emacs version 20 or higher, or, XEmacs version 20.3 or higher (ESingular is only included in the Linux distribution, on other Unix platforms you can download the Singular emacs lisp files but we give no warranties for specific platforms).
  on-line html help	netscape browser
  on-line info help	info, or tkinfo texinfo browser programs
  TAB completion and history mechanism of ASCII-terminal interface	shared readline library, i.e. /usr/lib/libreadline.so
  visualization of curves and surfaces	surf version 0.9 or higher (only available for Linux and Solaris).

  You may download most of these programs from

  ftp://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/pub/Math/Singular/utils/.

• Customize the on-line help system:

  By default, on-line help is displayed in the html format using the netscape program.

  However, this behavior can be customized in several ways using the SINGULAR commands system("--browser",<browser>) and system("--allow-net", 1) (or, by starting up SINGULAR with the respective command line options).

  In particular, creating the file Singular/2-0-4/LIB/.singularrc and putting the SINGULAR command

  system("--allow-net", 1);

  in it, allows the on-line help system to fetch its html pages from Singular’s WWW home site in case its local html pages are not found. That is, you may delete your local html pages, after setting this option.

  See also The online help system, Command line options, and Startup sequence, for more details on customizing the on-line help system.

• Add the line

  * Singular:(singular.hlp). A system for polynomial computations

  to your system-wide dir file (usually /usr/info/dir or /usr/local/info/dir and copy or soft-link the file Singular/2-0-4/info/singular.hlp to the directory of your dir file.
  This assures that the SINGULAR manual can be accessed from stand-alone texinfo browser programs such as info or Emacs. (It is not necessary for the use of the help system from within Singular.)

Troubleshooting

• General: SINGULAR can not find its libraries or on-line help
  1. Make sure that you have read and/or execute permission the files and directories of the Singular distribution. If in doubt, cd to the directory where you unpacked SINGULAR, and do (as root, if necessary):

     chmod -R a+rX Singular

  2. Start up SINGULAR, and issue the command system("Singular");. If this does not return the correct and expanded location of the SINGULAR executable, then you found a bug in SINGULAR, which we ask you to report (see below).
  3. Check whether the directories containing the libraries and on-line help files can be found by SINGULAR: If $bindir denotes the directory where the SINGULAR executable resides, then SINGULAR looks for library files as follows:
     (0) the current directory
     (1) all dirs of the environment variable SINGULARPATH
     (2) $bindir/LIB
     (3) $bindir/../LIB
     (4) /usr/local/Singular/2-0-4/LIB
     (4) /usr/local/Singular/LIB
     The on-line info files need to be at $bindir/../info and the html pages at $bindir/../html.

  You can inspect the found library and info/html directories by starting up SINGULAR with the --version option, or by issuing the SINGULAR command system("--version");.

• Under SuSE-Linux, ESINGULAR does not display a prompt: This is due to the very restrictive access rights of /dev/pty* of the standard SuSE distribution (starting from version 6.3 on). As root, do one of the following: Either

  chmod 666 /dev/pty*

  or,

  chmod g+s $(which emacs) chgrp tty $(which emacs) chmod g+s $(which xemacs) chgrp tty $(which xemacs)

  See also http://sdb.suse.de/sdb/de/html/ke_devpts-63.html for details.

• For HPUX systems:
  The /etc/termcap files which are pre-installed on these systems are broken which leads to messages like

  Name collision between 9826 9836

  when SINGULAR is started. To fix this, you can get fixed termcap files from ftp://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/pub/Math/Singular/utils by downloading the files termcap-<uname-description> and either replace your /etc/termcap file by the file found there, or view, and redo the respective changes by diff’ing the downloaded and the original file.

• For ix86-Linux systems:
  Due to some incompatibilities of shared libraries, the start-up of SINGULAR might fail with messages like

  Can not find shared library ...

  For DEBIAN systems, try to do ln -s /usr/lib/libncurses.so /usr/lib/libncurses.so.4.
  If this fails (and on other systems) download and install Singular-2-0-4-ix86-Linux-static.tar.gz.

• For AIX systems:
  The default info program of the system is not GNU’s texinfo browser which is used to display the on-line documentation in the info format. Therefore, the distribution of the AIX executable already contains the info browser program. If you remove this program, make sure that the GNU info program is executed if you call ’info’ from your shell.
• For any other troubles:
  Please send an email to singular@mathematik.uni-kl.de and include the header which is displayed by starting up SINGULAR with the -v option, and a description of your machine (issue the command uname -a on your shell) in your report.