Re: gEDA-user: Compiling MMI (electromagnetic simulator)

[Dan McMahill <dan@mcmahill.net>]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 06:13:34PM +0000, Karel Kulhav? wrote:
> Hello
> 
> MMI promises to compute distributed paramteres of copper strips on
> PCB.
> 
> I chewed throught the latex2html stumbling block and hit another one
> -- mmi (aka tnt - I don't know why there is a naming schizophreny)
> installed without any complaints, but refuses to run:
> 
> clock@beton:~$ tnt
> Error in startup script: can't find package Itcl
>     while executing
> "package require Itcl"
>     (file "/usr/local/bin/tnt.tcl" line 114)
>     invoked from within
> "source [file join [file dirname [info script]] tnt.tcl]"
>     (file "/usr/local/bin/tnt" line 19)
> 
> I determined I need some package called "itcl" (don't know what it does,
> but it isn't mentioned in README) so I stuck it into google and found itcl
> homepage:
> 
> http://incrtcl.sourceforge.net/itcl/
> 
> There are several versions where I randomly chosen the latest one because
> don't have any clue what version I should install. Got 3.2.1 from
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13244

OK, I have beaten this problem into submission.  For those of you who use
NetBSD, I've add a pkgsrc package for tnt/mmtl as pkgsrc/cad/tnt so you
can 'cd /usr/pkgsrc/cad/tnt && make install'.  For everyone else, here's
the story on how to get it going:

- you need latex and latex2html for the build

- you need tcl>=8.4 for tnt to run correctly.  It uses a number of features
  which are not there in older versions.  tcl-8.3 is not new enough

- you need itcl.  Here's where it gets painful.  The latest itcl release
  was 3.2.1 which was made years ago.  Unfortunately it does _not_ work with
  tck-8.4.  Oh joy!  So what you have to do is get a more recent itcl from
  CVS from http://incrtcl.sourceforge.net/itcl/.  But wait, there's more.
  I couldn't get it to install cleanly.  Looks like they started making some
  build/install system changes but didn't quite get the new one working so
  this took some hacking to make it go.  Also, you need iwidgets which seems
  to be part of the same itcl project.

  Your other possibility is to find some pre-build itcl.  Google says there
  are some rpms for linux of itcl-3.3 (what the CVS sources report the version
  as).

The good news is that after all this, I've been able to run the program and 
do some sanity checks on its output and it seems pretty reasonable.

-Dan



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