Re: BLT on Linux

[Todd Allen]

Matthew Mitchell wrote:
> 
> I have installed swarm on Redhat Linux (4.0) and I have got everything
> working except the contents of graph windows does not appear.
> 
> I installed Tk4.1 and Tcl7.5 then BLt2.1.  To get Tcl and Tk to
> install I had to apply patches to the versions supplied in swarm's
> required-software.
> 
> I also got swarm to compile Ok, however when I compiled the demonstration
> mousetraps program, I found I had to include -ldl in Makefile.conf
>  SYSLIBS.

I experienced exactly these problems when I installed swarm.  This is
common to the Redhat distributions of Linux. This is not just a problem
with BLT; it involves tk and tcl as well. The problem appears to stem
from the fact that the install sets for the newer versions of tk, tcl,
and blt want to install the new packages in different locations from
where the old versions were located (e.g. /usr/local/lib rather than
/usr/lib).  As a result, tcl install finds and links to pieces of the
old version of tk. BLT and libtclobjc were doing the same when linking
to tk and tcl, and swarm was finding old pieces of all of the packages. 
To correct the problem, I simply removed all of the old components (of
tk, tcl, blt, libtclobjc, etc.) from the /usr/lib directory,
re-installed all the supporting libraries, and put links in the /usr/lib
directory to the new libraries in the /usr/local/lib directory, and
swarm and the demo apps built and ran without problems.  This is not a
particularly elegant solution, but it works.  If this doesn't work or
isn't clear, you can e-mail me directly and cc the list, and I can give
you more detailed instructions.

Good luck,

Todd

-- 
Todd Allen
The Johns Hopkins University
Department of Economics
address@hidden
410-516-7571 (office)