How To Compile MiXViews

If you work on a platform other than: then you may wish to comple MiXViews yourself from the source code. This is a bit of work, but well worth it for what you can do with this program for free.

You will need the following resources in order to compile MiXViews:

  1. A decent C++ compiler (Gnu 2.95.2, for example). The newest version is available on prep.ai.mit.edu
  2. The tarred, compressed source for MiXViews , available on music.columbia.edu as:

    3. [BIN]mxv-current-source.tar.bz2 (289K)
  4. The X11 R5 or R6 binaries, libraries, config files, and headers, installed.
  5. The complete distribution of the InterViews 3.2a C++ X toolkit , configured, compiled, and installed. 
    Linux users can now simply untar a pre-compiled distribution available in the binaries directory on the ftp site.
    Compiling InterViews is unfortunately a very complex operation -- study the included README file before attempting to configure or compile InterViews. The source is available on sgi.com.
  1. The Gnu C++ librarys (egcs) distribution, configured, compiled, and installed. It is available on prep.ai.mit.edu.  It is important that you install the older libg++ portion of this distribution, because MiXViews depends on several of the older headers, such as String.h and Complex.h.
  2. The f2c.h header file (minimally) plus the compiled and installed library, or else an equivalent fortran library (typically libF77.a). The f2c source is public domain and available in many software archives.

Once all the above are on your system, and you have untarred the source for MiXViews into some directory, make sure that the environmental variable CPU is set (see the InterViews documentation for more on this). You will no doubt have to examine carefully and possibly edit the Imakefile that comes with MiXViews to set some macros such as the name of your fortran library, and to adjust the compiler flags, though most of this should be configured in the InterViews config files. Note: If you are using the InterViews library version 3.1 (as opposed to v. 3.2), you will need to remove the -DIV_IS_PATCHED flag from the compiler options. If you fail to do this, many keyboard equivalents for commands will not work.

Before you do the ivmkmf and make, you need to set an environmental variable CPU to the correct type for your machine. Here are the values:

For ex., on an SGI, do 'setenv CPU SGI' at the command line.

Type the command "ivmkmf -a" in the directory containing the MiXViews source. Ivmkmf is an InterViews script (installed with the rest of the IV binaries, etc.) and will create a subdirectory in which the objects and executable will be put, and create the necessary Makefiles and do the dependencies. DO NOT USE THE X11 RELEASE 6 MAKEDEPEND COMMAND. It has a bad bug in it, and none of the Makefile dependency lines will work -- which can lead to inconsistent binaries. Use the X11 R5 or R4 makedepend command.

Type "make", and get some coffee or something. The binary will be called "mxv", and will be in the subdir mentioned above.

Install the file MiXViews.ad in whichever place you keep X resource files (usually /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults) as "MiXViews".

Study the users guide here for information on how to use the program. 

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How To Compile MiXViews / doug@music.columbia.edu