Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

John Hammonds <[email protected]> · Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:06:40 -0500

As Andrew has stated, our admins have found openmotif RPMs and have
installed them on our machines here. I have built medm using these on
Fedora 6 and this is being used on a number of beamlines at APS. I have
also done a bit of testing of this on FC8. In order to avoid endorsing
a source for getting the RPMS I will simply say that a search of "Fedora
openmotif" does yield results. The issues with Fedora and openmotif
revolve around openmotif licensing as I understand it. I am a bit
worried about future prospects. 
I have built EDM with these libraries but have not really tested them. 
John
Andrew Johnson wrote:

On Monday 23 June 2008 08:59:20 Adams, Billy R. (LARC-D401B)[RAYTHEON
TECHNICAL SERVICES CO] wrote:

 What I have found since Fedora Core 6, newer versions (and mainly

based on Fedora 7) Fedora becomes extremely difficult replace lesstif

with openmotif. More and more, the newer Fedora versions are becoming

dependant on lesstif. Removing lesstif cause more things to not work

(or not work correctly).

But even more important in the EPICS world, it becomes harder to

get EPICS code to work. Openmotif is supported by EPICS code. Lesstif

is not supported by EPICS code and this has been stated by developers

that their management does not permit support of lesstif.

It's not that they don't permit us to support lesstif, we just don't have
anyone with time to do it â patches are always welcome. Actually the
necessary changes to get MEDM to build with lesstif are available in the CVS
version (thanks to Bob Soliday), but I don't know if he's done any extensive
testing with them or not.

 In summary, it is my belief that Fedora Core 6 is the last Fedora

OS that is usable by EPICs code. I must use at least Fedora Core 4

since I have RAID disk controllers. I have been unable to use Fedora 7,

8, & 9.

Since the APS uses Fedora significantly (we're currently on RHEL3 and FC6,
upgrading to FC8 slowly) we are going to have to continue to be able to build
our code (MEDM, ALH, StripTool, etc.) on it for a long time to come; the
future for the EPICS Motif tools should not be quite as bleak as you believe.
I don't know where our sysadmins get the rpms from, but my FC8 development
system currently has the following openmotif packages installed:

openmotif-2.3.0-1

openmotif-devel-2.3.0-1

I can't build medm on this system right now because it's missing libXmu-devel,
but I don't expect any problems once I have that (and anything else missing)
installed. I guess the MEDM documentation should probably list the packages
needed for building it, but we can't do that for all distros.
Our FC6 systems have these:
	openmotif-2.3.0-0.1.9.3.fc6.ccrma
	openmotif-devel-2.3.0-0.1.9.3.fc6.ccrma
Our older operational application servers running RHEL 3 use these packages:
	openmotif-2.2.2-16
	openmotif-devel-2.2.2-16
APS is not responsible for edm, hopefully John Sinclair will respond about
that.
- Andrew

--
John Hammonds
Beamline and Data Acquisition Group
APS Engineering Support Division
Argonne National Laboratory
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
(630)252-5317

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System