Icon System requirements

XTide is Unix software. Any reasonably modern version of Unix should work. XTide has been ported to a variety of other operating systems with differing levels of success. These ports will be discussed in a later section.

As of 1998-05-30, I personally test XTide under Slackware Linux 3.3 and Solaris 2.6, with the rare foray to Irix. While it is my intention that XTide will run flawlessly on any flavor of Unix, Linux is the flavor that I use for development. Infer from that what you will. People run XTide on many different platforms, and I make portability fixes whenever problems arise.

XTide 2 was targeted for machines with at least as many MIPS as a 166 MHz Pentium and with at least 5 megs of memory to burn. A Sparc 20 will do OK, but if what you have is a 33 MHz 386 with 5 megs total memory then you should probably run XTide 1 instead.

To compile XTide you will need a C++ compiler. XTide is written in a very portable subset of C++. If there is any problem compiling XTide with any C++ compiler, ANSI-compliant or otherwise, I will attempt to address it. The compiler used for development was g++ version 2.7.2.2.

In addition to the minimal set of X11 libraries that pretty much everyone has, you will also need the following libraries:

tide and xttpd can be compiled in the absence of X-windows libraries. However, you will still need libpng and libz.

libXpm comes standard with all Linux distributions, but not with Openwin. If you need it, you can get it at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/X11/contrib/libraries/xpm-3.4j.tar.gz, or from one of the many other mirrors of the X11 directory tree.

Pointers to the latest libpng and libz can be found under the PNG home page at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngcode.html. Some Unix installations come with versions of these libraries that do not work, so take care if using existing libraries.

The final requirement is only for those who want tide predictions for non-U.S. locations to have the correct Summer Time (Daylight Savings Time) adjustments. In order for this to work, your platform must provide a version of Olson's zoneinfo database that supports the needed time zones. Slackware's time zone database will work almost anywhere; Solaris's will work for some locations outside of the U.S.; Irix's will work almost nowhere except inside the U.S. If necessary, you may be able to upgrade your time zone database using the latest version from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/. I have no experience with that since I just use Linux.