MB-System is included is several package manager systems for Mac and Linux repositories, providing an easy means for installing our software. The biggest advantage of using package managers is that the prerequisite packages are identified and installed automatically. In most cases these packages are not prepared and maintained by MB-System developers, and generally the versions available in external packages lag those available from us through source distributions (particularly in the repositories described as stable). We think that the majority of MB-System users now install the software through one of these package managers.
Poseidon Linux
MB-System is included in Poseidon Linux, the "Scientific GNU/Linux". Poseidon is an Ubuntu Linux based distribution including a selection of open source software packages intended to support scientific research. In particular, it offers several specific tools in the areas of GIS, 3D Visualization, Mathematics, Statistics and several other fields of research.
UbuntuGIS for Ubuntu Linux
MB-System is one of the packages maintained in the UbuntuGIS repository.
OSGeo-Live Distribution
The OSGeo-Live distribution includes MB-System. OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or Virtual Machine based on Lubuntu that includes a wide variety of open source geospatial software.
HomeBrew for MacOs
MB-System has been packaged for MacOs X using the Homebrew package manager. If you have Homebrew installed, then MB-System and its prerequisites can be installed from the science "tap" using these two commands:
However, the MB-System package in homebrew/science frequently lags the most recent release and does not integrate with the OTPS tide modeling package. In order to install the current release and/or include the tide correction functionality, then install OTPS and MB-System from a private tap at:
Note that installing OTPS requires a Fortran compiler, and may cause Homebrew to install all of the gcc compiler suite.
Fink for MacOs
MB-System has been packaged for MacOS X as part of the Fink Project. The MB-System Fink package can be found at:
If the fink package manager is installed, then MB-System and its prerequisites can be installed using this command:
Unfortunately, as of May 2017 there are library namespace issues associated with the OpenMotif package that result in MB-System graphical utilities not working. For now, we recommend installing MB-System on MacOS computers using the Homebrew package manager.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Christian Ferreira for creating and distributing Poseidon Linux, to Johan Van de Wauw for updating the MB-System package in UbuntuGIS, to Kurt Schwehr for maintaing the Fink MB-System package, to Anthony Lukach, Simon Dreutter, and Andrew Janke for maintaining the Homebrew MB-System package, and to Hamish Bowman for maintaining the OSGeo-Live MB-System package.
The source code for MB-System is available as a compressed tar archive by anonymous ftp to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). This archive file is about 16 megabytes in size and, depending on the speed of your internet connection, may take a few minutes to transfer.
Click here to ftp the current MB-System release as a compressed tar archive.
Click here to get point-and-click ftp access to all of the MB-System related files available from MBARI (these may include data examples and beta distributions of MB-System ).
If access through the above links fails, try running ftp from a terminal shell. The following commands represent a typical anonymous ftp session (note that literally_anything literally means anything or nothing followed by a return, and that many modern ftp clients do not require the "binary" command).
MB-System requires a number of other software packages and databases to be fully functional. If one is building and installing MB-System from the source distribution, these prerequisite packages must be installed first. Often, the easiest way to obtain the prerequisite software is through one or more package managers.
The prerequisite software includes:
MB-System produces Postscript based graphics. Most current Unix operating systems provide a program which serves as a screen-based Postscript viewer. If you do not have a Postscript viewer, one option is to obtain one of several Ghostscript-based packages from the Free Software Foundation. The best is gv:
The MB-System source code is extracted from the distribution using the tar utility:
or for some older systems with feature-limited versions of tar, a combination of gunzip and tar:
This will create a directory called (for the 5.5.2309 distribution):
In order to build and install MB-System from an interactive shell, you need to change your current directory to the distribution:
General Instructions
The configure script has been generated using the autoconf package. The current configure script does not resolve all of the flags and locations needed to build MB-System on all platforms, but does allow for flexible installation and generation and use of shared libraries without requiring interactive editing. These improvements make MB-System distributions much more amenable to inclusion in package manager systems like Debian and Homebrew. We hope to improve the configure script so that less intervention is required.
The basic steps for building MB-System using the configure script are:
1. Move to the top of the MB-System distribution directory:
2. Run the configure script to generate the Makefile files throughout the distribution directory structure. The command line options for configure are discussed below, and common examples for different operating systems are provided towards the bottom of this page.
3. Run the make utility to build the software within the source distribution.
4. Run the make utility with the install option to install the software within the target location that was specified while running configure. This step copies the libraries, programs, scripts, manual pages, and web pages to the target destinations.
The configure script is intended to discern the environment, locate prerequisite packages, and construct the makefiles with a minimum of user intervention. In practice, users generally need to set at least some options when using the configure script in order to successfully build, install, and run MB-System. If NetCDF and GMT installations cannot be located, MB-System cannot be built. If FFTW3, Motif, or OpenGL cannot be found MB-System will be built, but without the applications that depend on these packages.
Depending on how user permissions are set on your system and where the package is to be installed, it may be necessary to execute some or all of the above commands with superuser privileges. On older styles of Unix and Linux, this was typically accomplished by using the su command to become root, or superuser, a step that requires knowing the root password for the system. Following a successful invocation of su in a command shell, all commands have superuser privileges. On MacOsX and other "modern" flavors of Unix and Linux, it's more common to use the sudo command in front of other commands in order to execute them with superuser privileges. An administrator password is required for the first instance of sudo, but not for subsequent instances (at least for a period of time, typically five minutes). In this case, the commands become:
The default destination is /usr/local, and so one should find the MB-System executable programs and scripts in /usr/local/bin, the shared libraries in /usr/local/lib, the manual pages in /usr/local/man, and the projection and Levitus databases accessed by MB-System in /usr/local/share/mbsystem. However, one can control the installation destination of the configure script on the command line by using a "--prefix" argument. For example, to install MB-System into /Users/caress/sandbox/mbsystem, you can use:
The complete list of configure's installation location options is:
MB-System depends on librarys from a number of different packages, including NetCDF, GMT5, GDAL, FFTW3, X11, and Motif. Sometimes a user will have more than one installation of a package available, and specifying which is used is desirable. Also, unfortunately the configure script does not always successfully find all needed packages. Consequently, the configure script allows users to set the locations on the command line when necessary. The configure command line options controlling the locations of prerequisites are:
The MB-System distribution includes the source code for the PROJ4 package. By default, the configure script seeks to link with a libproj built external to MB-System. Configure accepts the command --enable-bundledproj to build MB-System using the included PROJ4 source.
Note that specification of FFTW3, Motif, and OpenGL is optional. If the configure script does not find these packages and the user does not specify their locations, then some MB-System programs will not be built. Lack of FFTW3 means that mbsegypsd is not built. No OpenGL results in the visualization programs mbgrdviz and mbeditviz not being built. Lack of Motif means that no graphical programs of any type are built.
User Environment Setup
Regardless of where the MB-System programs are installed, users must have that location included in their path environment variable in order to execute the programs from a command line. If MB-System has been installed using a package manager or installed manually into a common location (e.g. /usr/local/bin), the user path probably already references the needed location. If altering the user path variable is required, it can be accomplished by editing the initialization files hidden in the user's home directory. Which files need to be edited depends on which command line shell is being used. If the user works with csh, then the .cshrc and .login files need to be changed. If the shell is bash, then the .bashrc and .profile files must be altered. See the manual pages for the relevant shell program to determine how to set the user environment. The executable perl must also be available in the user's path for most of the macros to work.
The MB-System tools mbcontour, mbswath, and mbgrdtiff are actually structured as GMT5 modules that are invoked as an argument to the program gmt:
In order for GMT to successfully execute the MB-System modules, the location of the shared libraries containing the dynamically loaded modules must be known to GMT. This can be accomplished by either setting the GMT_CUSTOM_LIBS parameter in the file gmt.conf that is part of the GMT installation, by setting this parameter in the file gmt.conf in the user's home directory, or by using the GMT module gmtset to modify this parameter in the current working directory. The Mb-System GMT modules are included in a shared library file named mbsystem.so that is installed in the same location as the regular MB-System shared libraries (e.g. libmbio), which is typically a location such as /usr/local/lib. If mbsystem.so has been installed in /usr/local/lib, then the GMT_CUSTOM_LIBS parameter in a gmt.conf file can be set to:
The parallel processing modules mbm_multiprocess, mbm_multidatalist, and mbm_multicopy require the perl module Parallel::ForkManager. This can be added to your local perl installation using the command line utility cpan:
The MB-System plotting macros mbm_grdplot, mbm_plot, etc all generate shellscripts that in turn execute a combination of GMT, MB-System, and other programs to generate and then display postscript plots or images. The MB-System program mbdefaults sets the programs you want to use to display postscript files and images on the screen. If, for instance, you want to use "gv" to display postscript and "feh" to display images, then run:
These defaults are stored in a hidden file called ".mbio_defaults" in the user's home directory.
Prerequisite Installation using HomeBrew and Configure Arguments for MacOS
As noted above, MB-System has been packaged for MacOs X using the Homebrew package manager. One can also use Homebrew to install the prerequisite packages and then build and install MB-System from a local source code distribution.
MacOS does not include a compiler suite or the X11 windowing system by default. First install XCode (the Apple development environment architected using the LLDB compiler suite) from the Apple App Store. Then install the current version of XQuartz available from the web page http://www.xquartz.org.
Next, install homebrew by following the directions at the website https://brew.sh
Once you have Homebrew installed, then the MB-System prerequisites can be installed using the following commands:
Note that installing OTPS requires a Fortran compiler, and may cause Homebrew to install all of the gcc compiler suite.
Once all of the prerequisites are installed, get the current MB-System distribution from the ftp site.
Put the distribution in /usr/local/src and unpack it
Run the configure script to generate the makefiles
-g -I/opt/X11/include -L/opt/X11/lib\
Now that the makefiles exist, run make:
Many MacOsX users have their NetCDF, GDAL, PROJ, GMT5, FFTW3, and OpenMotif installations through the Fink package manager, which installs packages in /sw. To install the MB-System prerequisites:
The configure script is able to find the NetCDF, GDAL and GMT5 installations because they install the programs nc-config, gdal-config, and gmt-config, respectively, in /sw/bin. However, the configure script fails to find the PROJ, FFTW3, and OpenMotif packages in /sw, and so the user must explicitly specify those packages. The OTPS tide modeling software used by mbotps is not packaged in Fink, and so must be manually installed by a user if mbotps is to work correctly. Installation of MB-System on a Mac will likely use a configure command that looks something like:
As shown here, one can also add to the commands seen by the compiler ("CFLAGS") and linker ("LDFLAGS") if desired or necessary by prefacing the configure command with arguments setting the environment variables CFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Here the location of X11 header files and libraries in MacOS (in /opt) must be specified because this location is not known to the configure script. Another example is that in order to compile MB-System for user with a debugger, all compiler commands must include the "-g" argument. So, to enable use of the lldb debugger, the configure command becomes:
For Ubuntu Linux 16, the following use of the apt-get utility will install all of the MB-System prerequisites excepting OTPS:
If the prerequisites have all been installed as shown above, and it is desired to install MB-System in /usr/local, then only a simple call to configure is required:
Once the makefiles have been generated by configure, build and install using:
In some cases the system and/or user environment impedes the successful use of the GMT and/or MB-System shared libraries. In order to manually allow shared libraries to be found for linking or running, one can either set the CFLAGS environment variable during building or set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable at login by adding a command to the user's ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc files.
To set the CFLAGS environment variable during building include "-Wl,-rpath -Wl,LIBDIR" in the configure command as shown here:
To augment the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable during login add a line to the ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile file as shown here:
MB-System now requires GMT 5.2.1 or later. Although the standard Ubuntu package manager apt-get installs a current GMT on Ubuntu 16, on Ubuntu 12 and 14 the available GMT version is 5.1, with the consequence that a manual GMT installation is required before MB-System can be installed. Also, many of the prerequisite package names are different in the older Ubuntu distributions than in Ubuntu 16.
For Ubuntu Linux 12 or 14, the following use of the apt-get utility will install all of the MB-System prerequisites excepting GMT5 and OTPS:
In order to install GMT5 manually, follow the installation instructions in the GMT documentation or in the excellent GMT5 installation guide by Andrew Moody at:
Prerequisite Installation and Configure Arguments for CentOs or Red Hat Linux
The package manager usually used on CentOs or Red Hat Linux systems is yum. To install all of the MB-System prerequisites use the command:
If the prerequisites have all been installed with yum and it is desired to install MB-System in /usr/local, then only a simple call to configure is required:
Last Updated: $Id: mbsystem_how_to_get.html 2314 2017-08-24 19:52:17Z caress $