Installation Guide for Metview 4.5 and above

Overview

From version 4.5, Metview uses CMake for its compilation and installation. This is part of the process of homogenising the installation procedures for all ECMWF packages. 

As with configure, CMake will run some tests on the system to find out if required third-party software libraries are available and notes their locations (paths). Based on this information it will produce the Makefiles needed to compile and install Metview.

CMake is a cross-platform free software program for managing the build process of software using a compiler-independent method.

Requirements

Platforms

At ECMWF, openSUSE 11.3, openSUSE 13.1, SLES 11 and Red Hat 6 Linux systems (64bit) were used for the regular usage and testing of Metview. Other Linux platforms are used for occasional testing.

ECMWF support libraries

All required support libraries from ECMWF are available without charge from the Software Services web page:

• http://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/tools-and-guidance/software

To produce plots, Magics must be installed:

• Magics++ (2.22 or higher is required)

  • should be configured with the -DENABLE_METVIEW option

  • for a 'pure batch' installation of Metview with no user interface, it is possible to supply Magics with the options -DENABLE_METVIEW_NO_QT

The following two libraries need to be installed (both are required, even if you will not handle GRIB or BUFR data):

• GRIB_API (1.9.9 or higher)

  • see the Installation FAQ for details of building GRIB_API for Metview, as this contains some important information

• EmosLib

  • version 392 or higher

  • compiled with double floating point precision (answer “y” to “Do you want 64-bit reals? [y,n]”)

  • must be built with GRIB_API support

  • 64-bit versions should be built with -fPIC compilation flag

  • Remember to set the ARCH environment variable before building Emoslib, e.g. export ARCH=linux.
    

Notes for installers of Metview 3

If you have installed Metview 3 before, then here are some things to note. Metview 4 does not use directly OpenGL for its on-screen graphics; therefore, it is not necessary to build your own Mesa library anymore. However, Metview 4 does not come with its own Emoslib; therefore, it will be necessary to install your own.

Metview 4 can be installed side-by-side with an existing Metview 3 installation. However, note that the default startup script will be

/usr/local/bin/metview

so make sure this will not clash with an existing installation. See Compilation and installation on page 6 for details of flags which will allow you to change this.

Compilation and installation

It is advisable to perform an 'out-of-source build', meaning that the build should take place in a directory separate from where the source code is. Here is an example set of commands to set up and build Metview using default settings:

# unpack the source tarball into a temporary directory
mkdir -p /tmp/src
cd /tmp/src
tar xzvf Metview-4.5.0-Source.tar.gz

# configure and build in a separate directory
mkdir -p /tmp/build
cd /tmp/build
cmake /tmp/src/Metview-4.5.0-Source
make

Although it is possible to run Metview directly from the build directory, it is best to install it. The installation directory is /usr/local by default, but can be changed by adding the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX  flag to the cmake command. In this case, the configure, build and install step would look like this:

cmake /tmp/src/Metview-4.5.0-Source -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/metview_install_dir
make
make install

CMake options used in Metview