Daylight Software Version 4.73 Release Notes for Red Hat Linux

Back to Daylight Software Version 4.73 Release Notes




Rev: November 15, 2001


CONTENTS


I. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
II. ENDIAN ISSUES




I. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS


- An Intel or Intel-Compatible PC running Red Hat Linux 6.1 or higher with networking.


- An ethernet card on the PC via which the PC is networked. This card is absolutely necessary as its MAC address is used for licensing.


NOTE: Software was built on Red Hat Linux 6.2. Software passed testing on Red Hat Linux 6.1, 6.2 and 7.1. It runs well on these versions, however we do recommend RedHat Linux 6.2. Red Hat 7.2 has not been tested at this time. No other Linux versions have been tested at this time.


At this moment there is no support for clustered Linux in this release.




II. ENDIAN ISSUES


Intel and Intel-compatible processors, unlike the SGI MIPS or Sun SPARC processors, are little endian. Endianness refers to how the byte-ordering which the processor uses internally to store numbers. A big endian processor like the Sun SPARC or SGI MIPS processor represents a number 0x1000, as 0x1000 internally. A little endian processor like the Intel Pentium represents this as 0x0010 internally instead. The ordering of the individual bytes is swapped. This is a factor when performing datatype conversion and writing binary files.


The Daylight 4.71 software has been written so that endianness is never an issue. Hence all Daylight Database files may be used interchangeably between Sun, SGI or Intel-Linux computers. The only case where endianness is an issue is in the clogp binary database files. You cannot use a fragment database binary file created on a Sun or SGI on an Intel Linux computer. However the textual form of the fragment files can be interchanged and used. When the clogp program runs the first time, it checks for a binary file and generates it, if not present, from the text file. The generated binary file is of the correct endianness for the system.