Posts

Posted on

That African-American Was Crazy

"He faced the ultimate test…Whether or not you can survive death- that's the ultimate test for your ass, ain't it?"

I was half-way through "Richard Pryor: Live in Concert" when the news passed the wires. My iPod is never without Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. What Lenny Bruce broke open, Richard Pryor broke through. Never before, none since. "That's the politics, baby."

Posted on

OpenPBS config.guess File (Force Mod) For An AMD64 (IA64) Installation

In the process of setting up the CIA cluster for DMol3 (Accelrys) and Gaussian calculations. The use of a batch queuing system is recommended by Accelrys to take advantage of available resources (as they become available). The only open-source package they put their name to is OpenPBS (at openpbs.org). Compilation on a 64bit dual core AMD Opteron box (or any 64bit Linux system) gives the following error message.

a] [../OpenPBS ]# ./configure
creating cache ./config.cache
checking host system type... Invalid configuration `ia64-pc-linux-gnuoldld': machine `ia64-pc' not recognized

Invalid configuration `ia64-pc-linux': machine `ia64-pc' not recognized
configure: error: config.sub failed on ia64-pc-linux

The problem is that OpenPBS's (terribly out-of-date) auto-config script for configure doesn't know 64bit Linux out of the box. The solution to this is to not let configure guess the machine type. This is done by modifying a single line in the config.guess file located in the OpenPBS "../buildutils/" directory.

You can either go into the config.guess file and change the line

b] #UNAME_MACHINE=`(uname -m) 2>/dev/null` || UNAME_MACHINE=unknown

to

c] UNAME_MACHINE=i686

or download the altered config.guess file HERE. The downloaded file has a .txt extension to it (in case your browser gets confused) which you'll have to delete when you download it

d] mv config.guess.txt config.guess

Just replace the existing config.guess file with this new one and ./configure away.

P.S. I'm doing this (these) installation(s) with OpenSuse 10.0. The default installation for OpenSuse was not designed for programmers (as I rant about HERE). You'll need to Yast gcc and tcl/tk packages to make OpenPBS (and just about everything else) compile. If you've not gotten that far yet, just install everything and accept the lost 6 GBs to peace of mind (and don't ask about fortran).