Compiling Avida in windows (sort of)

I’m actually using Linux Red Hat Enterprise 5, running inside the program VMware running in windows.

Here is some info about Avida.

What you’ll need: any of the vmware versions (they have free ones on their website), a version of red hat linux that is higher than Red hat 5.2, the file avida-1.3.1 from this site and the file gcc-2.95.3.tar.gz from one (any) of the mirror sites in this site.

Instructions: install vmware and then install red hat linux in it. There are lots of tutorials on how to do it and it’s not that hard. The version of linux that you can use has to be from Red Hat or something really close to it like Fedora and scientific Linux (I haven’t tried the last two) because we are just going to change the version of the compiler  so the rest of the c, c++ in the linux version you are using has to be close to what they used originally in Red Hat 5.2.  I used Red Hat Enterprise 5. After installing go to this site (the same one as in my previous post) and follow their instructions up to and including section 4.2. After that save the avida-1.3.1 folder (untarred) in a folder of your choice, go to it in the shell window, go to the source folder and type:

PATH=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin:$PATH [space]

CC=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin/gcc ./configure

If you got a permission denied error even if you are signed in as root, type the following line and then try again:

chmod -x configure  

Then type:

PATH=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin:$PATH [space]

CC=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin/gcc make

After that although the installation instructions in the folder say that you have to type make install, all you need to type is: ./avida in the source folder to run the program. That’s all there is to it.

 

Success!