Information

Pathway Tools Overview Pathway Tools Testimonials
Publications
Release Note History
Contributions
Pathway Tools Blog
Technical Datasheet
Fact Sheet
Pathway Tools Testimonials
Contact Us

Licensing

Academic Licenses Commercial Licenses

Technical Specs

Web Services
Pathway Tools APIs
Installation Guide
Ontologies
Operations
File Formats

Support

Submitting Bug Reports
Tutorials
FAQs
Webinars
Pathway Tools Installation Guide -- OpenMotif

Pathway Tools Installation Guide -- OpenMotif

Under Linux, Pathway Tools requires a specific variation of the Motif libraries, called OpenMotif. Some Linux distributions contain OpenMotif by default. Other Linux distributions use a different variation of these libraries called LessTif. LessTif is incompatible with Pathway Tools.

How to tell which variation of the Motif libraries you have. In our experience, Fedora Core 3 and Fedora Core 4 have OpenMotif by default, so you should not need to install it. You can determine if your Linux has OpenMotif installed as follows.

  • Locate the Motif library, which is called libXm.so , on your filesystem. On many Linux systems, such as from the RedHat family, this can be conveniently done by executing
    locate libXm.so
    This should return a short list of candidates, if a version of Motif was installed at all. Most of these will be symlinks to the actual library, which usually is the file with the most detailed version number. A typical location for this library is in /usr/X11R6/lib . Sometimes, we have seen the undesired LessTif located in /usr/lib .

  • Then, execute the following search operation on the library:
    strings /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.3 | grep -i version
    , substituting the library pathname with the one found on your system. Usually towards the end of the resulting output, one can find a string like:
    @(#)Motif Version 2.2.2
    or
    @(#)GNU/LessTif Version 1.2 Release 0.93.94

    The first case is the desired OpenMotif, whereas the latter is the undesired LessTif. If the latter was found, those library files need to be deleted (or at least moved outside of any lib directories that are searched for libraries), so they will not interfere with the correct OpenMotif, which will need to be installed now.

To install OpenMotif, download it from the MotifZone Web site. Select a 2.2 version (2.2.2 and 2.2.3 have the correct version of the library and have both been verified to work -- 2.3 does not). Follow the installation instructions from the OpenMotif Web site. Installation will require access as the root user.

Pathway Tools uses Motif via the file libXm.so.2 . However, OpenMotif nowadays is often distributed as libXm.so.3 , which is upward compatible with libXm.so.2 , so if your OpenMotif distribution contains libXm.so.3 but not libXm.so.2 , then you can create a symbolic link libXm.so.2 that points to libXm.so.3 so that Pathway Tools will be able to access OpenMotif via libXm.so.2 . This example shows how to make this symlink (you will need to be the root user):

cd /usr/X11R6/lib
ln -s libXm.so.3 libXm.so.2

If this is not done, an error of the following kind can occur when starting up Pathway Tools:

Warning: Loading sys:climxm.so failed with error:
        libXm.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.