Written by Ofri Sadowsky, 2003-01-15
Updated 2003-01-22
CMake is a cross-platform, open-source make system. It has become an installation tool for major open-source projects, of which our interest focuses on VTK, Slicer, and NLM Insight (ITK). Detailed information about CMake and files to download are on the web-site http://www.cmake.org.
This document describes in brief the installation process for the CMake package on the Linux workstation 'tragus' (Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche)). As of the creation of the document, CMake did not include an RPM (RedHat Package Manager). The installation was done manually.
Download the CMake distribution for Linux from http://www.cmake.org/HTML/Download.html.
gunzip the file to get a tar file. The tar contains a README and a second tar with the actual files to be installed in it.
Make sure that you open the second tar in a separate directory, so that you can easily keep track of the files to install. The files to install are set in the directories 'bin/', 'doc/', and 'share/'. Normally, these directories should be located under '/usr/local/'. That is, the files in them should be copied to, or the tarball opened in, '/usr/local/'. However, for our purposes we prefered to have them under '/usr/local/erc-share/', planning to have this directory mounted through NFS in the future. Also, it is easier to keep track of these files, which are not intalled using RPM, when they are in a separate directory.
You will need to have your environment set to include the '/usr/local/erc-share/' relevant subdirectories. For example, add the 'bin/' to the executable PATH.