I had some requests---Entrez/VMS summary (very long)

[Rick Westerman]

Thanks Steve for the 1500+ line posting of all the messages you have
received about making Entrez available to users. To summarize:


On VMS

  1) You must use DECwindows/Motif.

  2) If you wish to use the CD-roms, you must have a special CD driver to
     read this disks; this driver is easy to obtain.

  3) If you wish to use the NCBI-network version, then you must purchase
     the Multinet TCP/IP software. There are no public domain solutions.

  4) If you wish to use the line-oriented Entrez (e.g., "ANGIS") instead of
     DECwindows/Motif, then it is not available (see note 1).


On Unix

  1) You must use Xwindows/Motif.

  2) If you wish to use the CD-roms, then there are no problems.

  3) If you wish to use the NCBI-network version, then there are no problems.

  4) If you wish to use the line-oriented Entrez (e.g., "ANGIS") instead of
     Xwindows/Motif, then it may be available (see note 1).


On Dos

  1) You must use Windows.

  2) If you have your own CD drive, there are no problems.

  3) If you wish to use the NCBI-network version, then you must purchase
     the PC-NFS TCP/IP program or a WinSock-compatible TCP/IP program.
     There are no public domain solutions.

  4) If you wish to use a network mounted CD-rom, then you must have a 
     network in place (Novell, Pathworks, NFS-mounting); all of this
     requires purchase of software for the PC. There are no public domain
     solutions.


On Macs

  1) You already have a windowing system, no problem.

  2) If you wish to use the CD-roms, then there are no problems.

  3) If you wish to use the NCBI-network version, then there are no problems.

  4) If you wish to use a network mounted CD-rom, then you must have a 
     network in place (Appletalk, Pathworks, NFS-mounting); the Appletalk 
     network is built in, Pathworks/NFS will need to be purchased. If the 
     CD-rom is on UNIX or VMS, then software will need to be purchased.



Note 1:

  After struggling with porting the line-oriented version of Entrez (aka, 
  ANGIS or entrez-2d) for the last 4 days, my conclusions on the package
  are:

  1) It is nice.

  2) It doesn't seem to have too many bugs (I only found one so far). It
     does have several bad coding practices that cause the various 
     compilers to complain. A bug report is being sent to the developers.

  3) It is extremely UNIX SysV oriented.

  4) It probably will *not* compile cleanly on anything but Unix SysV.

  5) You can get it to compile on Ultrix (version 4.2A, DECstation 3100) 
     with some tweaking.

  6) You can not get it to compile on older Unix SysV systems (release
     3.1.1 AT&T 3b2) nor on other older Unix systems (SunOS 4.0).

  7) The code has so many UNIXisms and VMS's "curses" package is so old
     and non-SysV compatible, that porting the program to VMS will be a major
     task. Expect to spend two people-weeks doing the port. It may be
     possible to port the program using VMS's POSIX implementation, however
     you would have to put up with POSIX's slowness.



-- Rick

Rick Westerman                System Manager of the AIDS Center Laboratory
westerm at aclcb.purdue.edu      for Computational Biochemistry (ACLCB), BCHM
Phone: (317) 494-0505         bldg., Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN 47907
  FAX: (317) 494-7897