Creating a customized version of Pisces

This document refers to the "Pisces root directory", sometimes referred to simply as "$PISCES". At the Geometry Center the full pathname of this directory is /u/gcg/Pisces, but this path will vary from system to system. In a nutshell, $PISCES is the directory that contains all of the downloaded Pisces source code.

There are two steps to complete:

  1. create a Pisces "work directory";
  2. tell Pisces what kind of machine you are on.
Create a Pisces "work directory"
We suggest the following steps:

Environment setup (tell Pisces your machine type)
Before you do any Pisces development work you should edit your .cshrc (or the init file of whatever shell you use) so that it sets the MACHTYPE environment variable to a value that depends on the type of machine you're logged into. Currently the valid values are "sgi", "sun", and "next". As we expand Pisces to run on more machine types we will add more to this list.

In the simplest case, you will always run Pisces from the same kind of machine. If, for example, the machine on your desk is a SUN, then you can put the following line in your .cshrc file
setenv MACHTYPE "sun" .

The more complicated situation is that several people at your site want to use Pisces, possibly from different machines. At the Geometry Center our system-wide initialization file sets the CPUTYPE environment variable, so you can use its value to determine the value for MACHTYPE. The following C-shell command does this, so you can put this in your .cshrc file:

        switch ($CPUTYPE)
          case NeXT:
            setenv MACHTYPE "next" ;
            breaksw ;
          case iris4:
            setenv MACHTYPE "sgi" ;
            breaksw ;
          default:
          case sun4os4:
            setenv MACHTYPE "sun" ;
            breaksw ;
        endsw
       
The system of Pisces makefiles uses the MACHTYPE value.

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Last modified: Sun Nov 26 18:41:16 1995
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