ASITIC: Installing and Running

Introduction Command Reference Technology File Quickstart Sample Sessions FAQ
Installing ASITIC

After downloading the ASITIC common files and the appropriate binary (Linux, HP-UX, or SunOS) onto your system, decompress the files. The common file is a tar file gzipped and the binary file is a dynamically linked gzip compressed file. Note that some browsers may decompress the files automatically. To find out if the downloaded binary file is valid, type

file asitic_linux

For instance, on a Linux system you will should see the following message

asitic: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Otherwise, for a compressed file, the output should resemble

asitic.gz: gzip compressed data, deflated, original filename, `asitic', last modified: Sun May 13 14:16:58 2001, os: Unix

Finally place the binary files in a convenient location (such as /usr/local/bin or ~/bin. You should choose a location that is already in your PATH (type echo $PATH to see a list of such directories). Another option is to choose a directory where you will run ASITIC and to simply invoke the program by typing ./asitic.

ASITIC Binary Shared Libraries

The binary files are linked dynamically to reduce the size of the binary. Unfortunately, you may encounter some difficulties if the dynamic library versions on your system do not match the version of the dynamic libraries on the host system where ASITIC was compiled. To find you the dynamic library dependencies, type the following command

tcsh> ldd asitic

libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x40022000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x40030000)
libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 => /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 (0x400fe000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x40141000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40161000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

Besides the X11 libraries, ASITIC also requires the math and the standard C and C++ libraries. Some versions of ASITIC also require additional libraries such as high performance optimized BLAS and LAPACK (such as the Sun Performance Library) and OpenGL for 3D graphics. Any failed dependencies will require you to obtain the appropriate libraries before running ASITIC. A failed link will trigger a response similar to the following when you attempt to execute ASITIC

ld.so.1: asitic.SunOS.5.6: fatal: libXext.so.6.0: can't open file: errno=2

In some cases it is possible to still run ASITIC with older versions of the libraries. Simply creating a symbolic link file to the older library could trick the system into thinking that the libray is installed on your system. To avoid corrupting the public system directories, these links can be provided in the directory where ASITIC is installed (such as /usr/local/bin) and a user environmental variable can trigger the system to search additional directories for dynamically linked libraries. For instance, under SunOS the variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH controls the search path for dyanmic linking. Similarly, the variable SHLIB_PATH serves a similar purpose on HP-UX. Another option under HP-UX is to use the chatr program to change the attributes of the binary (see the manpage).

Running ASITIC

Once a technology file has been created and placed into the run directory, invoke the ASITIC binary as follows 

tcsh>  asitic -help
Usage:  asitic [options]
where [] indicates optional argument:

[-x execfile | --exec execfile]         Execute filename upon startup.
[-k keyfile | --keyboard keyfile]       Redirect keyboard input to filename.
[-t techfile | --tech techfile]         Use filename as the technology file.
[-i initfile | --init initfile]         Initialize asitic using filename.
[-l logfile | --log logfile]            Use logfile to log session.
[-g | --ngr | -nw | --nographics]       Do not open graphics window.
[-8]                                    Run in 8-bit graphics mode.
[-r | --rl | --readline]                Use the readline library.
[-v | --ver | --version]                Print version information and quit.
[-h | --help]                           Display help on command line options.

All the command line arguments are optional. The most convenient flag is the -t techfile flag to specify the technology file to use. Furthermore, the -l logfile can be used to change the name of the default log files asitic.LOG and asitic_i.LOG. To run ASITIC in batch mode, use the -x execfile and -g flags to suppress the graphics window and to run commands appearing in the execfile. While an execfile can contain only ASITIC commands, a keyfile can contain commands that require keyboard input. Each prompt can be answered with a single line of text in the keyfile. Refer to the ASITIC asitic_i.LOG log file for details.

The newer version of ASITIC require the X disply to have at least 16-bit color resolution. The visualization engine (for instance the piv command) uses colors to show current and charge distribution in the metallization. If you are running on an old X server, you can envoke an 8-bit mode with the -8 flag. You can examine your X server capabilities with the xdpyinfo command.

If the binary is compiled with readline support, you can invoke the -r flag to use the command line editing and history feature of ASITIC. This is similar to the command line editing capabilities to tcsh and matlab. By default the editing mode is emacs (versus vi). In future versions, you will be able to initialize ASITIC with an options file (by default .asitic in the running dir) to automatically set these options for every ASITIC session.