The current operating system in use in our lab is:

Mandriva 2006 PowerPack

To compile our code, try to install as many of the packages in the
forall/ directory, on top of a recent install of Linux where you have
selected to install absolutely everything. The other directories are
for special classes of machines (e.g., Beowulf nodes) and are not
needed for workstation-class machines.

Finding packages:

   rpmfind.net
   rpm.pbone.net

Installing packages:

   rpm -Uvh *.rpm

if it tells you that some dependencies are unsatisfied, look on your
distribution CDs for the missing packages and install them first. If
it tells you that some packages are already installed, this will abort
the operation and not install the other ones; so, delete the RPMs you
just downloaded for the already-installed packages and try again to
install the remaining ones.

-------------

8/17/03: this is work in progress; looks like the XML libs changed and
are incompatible with our code; I recommend using the old ones from
forall/ -- install the *xerces*.rpm packages from forall/, then copy
libxerces-c.so.1.7.0 to /usr/lib/, and finally, do something like:

cd /usr/lib
ln -fs libxerces-c.so.1.7.0 libxerces-c.so
ln -fs libxerces-c.so.1.7.0 libxerces-c.so.1

remember to re-do a ./configure in saliency/src3/ after you have
installed a bunch of packages. This is in particular important for
"make gtk" as the configure script will determine which paths to
include (all the needed gtk-related packages are on the Mandrake
distribution CDs, just make sure to install all the gtk*-devel,
gdk*-devel and their dependencies).

when you install the pvm-* packages, by default the pvm3d daemon will
be turned on as a system service; you can turn it off using chkconfig
or the "System Services" panel of the Mandrake control center.

make sure you look at the various posts regarding installation and
compilation problems, in the "Bugs" section of the iLab forum:
http://iLab.usc.edu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl