=========================================================================== OpenSource Erlang/OTP =========================================================================== Please read the whole file before attempting to build and install Erlang. You can find more information about OpenSource Erlang at http://www.erlang.org/ Portability ----------- Erlang/OTP should be possible to build from source on any Unix system, including Mac OS X. Instructions for building from source on Windows are in the file README.win32. Binary releases for Windows can be found at http://www.erlang.org/ At Ericsson we have a "Daily Build and Test" that runs on: Operating system Version ----------------------------------------------------------- Solaris/Sparc 2.8 (1) Linux/Suse x86 9.2 Linux/Suse Amd64 9.2 Linux/Suse Amd64 10.0 Linux/Montavista PPC 3.1 FreeBSD x86 5.0 Mac OS X 10.3.9 (2) Mac OS X 10.4.6 (2) Windows XP Windows 2003 (1) Older versions of Solaris should work as well, but we don't test them any longer. (2) Runs on an Apple eMac. See notes below. Required utilities ------------------ These are the tools you will need in order to unpack and build Erlang/OTP. Unpacking --------- GNU unzip, or a modern uncompress. A TAR program that understands the GNU TAR format for long filenames (such as GNU TAR). Compiling --------- GNU make GNU C compiler Perl 5 OpenSSL Optional but needed for building the Erlang/OTP applications 'ssl' and 'crypto'. You need the "development package" of OpenSSL, i.e. including the header files. For building the application 'ssl' the OpenSSL binary command program 'openssl' is also needed. At least version 0.9.7 of OpenSSL is required. Sun Java jdk-1.2.2 Or higher. Optional but needed for building the Erlang/OTP application 'jinterface' and parts of 'ic' and 'orber'. In addition to 1.2.2, we have tested jdk-1.3.1 and jdk-1.4.2. X Windows Optional, but development headers and libraries are needed to build the Erlang/OTP application 'gs' on Unix/Linux. sed There seem to be some problems with some of the 'sed' version on Solaris. Make sure "/bin/sed" or "/usr/bin/sed" is used on the Solaris platform. Flex Optional, headers and libraries are needed to build the flex scanner for the megaco application on Unix/Linux. Installing ---------- An install program that can take multiple file names. How to build and install Erlang/OTP ----------------------------------- Start by unpacking the Erlang/OTP distribution file with your GNU compatible TAR 1) gunzip -c otp_src_R11B-0.tar.gz | tar xf - 1) zcat otp_src_R11B-0.tar.gz | tar xf - Now cd into the base directory 2) cd otp_src_R11B-0 On some platforms Perl may behave strangely if certain locales are set, so optionally you may need to set the LANG variable: 3a) LANG=C; export LANG #Bourne shell or 3b) setenv LANG C #C-shell Run the following commands 4) ./configure [ options ] If you upgraded the source with the patch you may need to clean up from previous builds before the new build. Do a "make clean", see "Caveats" below. 5) make 6) make install Let's go through them in some detail: Step 4 runs a configuration script created by the GNU autoconf utility, which checks for system specific features and then creates a number of makefiles. The configure script allows you to customize a number of parameters; type "./configure --help" for details. One of the things you can specify is where Erlang/OTP should be installed; by default Erlang/OTP will install in /usr/local/{bin,lib/erlang,man/man1}; to keep the same structure but install in a different place, let's call it rather than /usr/local use the --prefix argument. Like so: "./configure --prefix=". This step will also configure any additional libraries unpacked in step 3 (if you didn't add any of the extra libraries configure will issue a warning saying that there is no configuration information in lib, this warning can safely be ignored). You can also specify where the OpenSSL include and library files are located, or else disable the use of SSL and Crypto. Other options are: --enable-smp-support See the next section. --disable-smp-support See the next section. --disable-threads Disable support for threaded I/O; this option also disables building of the SMP emulator. (See the next section.) --enable-threads Enable support for threaded I/O. (This is the default is SMP support is enabled. See the next section.) --disable-hipe Disable HiPE (High-Performance Erlang). HiPE will automatically be enabled on supported platforms. Step 5 first builds the Erlang emulator, this will take approximately five minutes on a reasonably fast machine. It then proceeds to build the Erlang/OTP libraries in the "lib" subdirectory using the built emulator and the bootstrap libraries provided in the "bootstrap" subdirectory. Compiling everything can take quite a long time, expect half an hour up to a couple of hours. After step 4 is completed you should have a working Erlang/OTP system which you can try by typing "bin/erl". This should start up Erlang/OTP and give you a prompt. Step 6 is optional. It installs Erlang/OTP (if you change your mind about where you wish to install you can rerun step 4, without having to do step 5 again). If you or your system has special requirements please read the Makefile for additional configuration information. Support for SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing) -------------------------------------------- New for this release is support for SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing). For more details, see the release notes for ERTS application and the documentation. Here follows some brief information. For platforms that are known by us to support the SMP emulator, the SMP emulator will be built automatically. Use "erl -smp" to start it. See the release notes for a list of the platforms. To force building of an SMP emulator, use "./configure --enable-smp-support". For more details about this, see the release notes. Use "./configure --disable-smp-support" if you for some reason don't want to have the SMP emulator built. If SMP support is enabled, support for threaded I/O will also be turned on (even in the standard, non-SMP emulator). How to install the Erlang/OTP documentation ------------------------------------------- For some graphical tools to find the on-line help you have to install the HTML documentation on top of the installed OTP applications, i.e. cd /lib/erlang gunzip -c otp_html_R11B-0.tar.gz | tar xf - For "erl -man " to work the Unix manual pages have to be installed in the same way, i.e. cd /lib/erlang gunzip -c otp_man_R11B-0.tar.gz | tar xf - GS (Graphic System) ------------------- GS now requires Tcl/Tk 8.3. It will be searched for when starting GS. Using HiPE ---------- If you are running on a platform supporting HiPE and if you have not disabled HiPE, you can compile a module into native code like this from the Erlang shell: c(Module, native). or c(Module, [native|OtherOptions]). Using the erlc program, write like this: erlc +native Module.erl The native code will be placed into the beam file and automatically loaded when the beam file is loaded. To add hipe options, write like this from the Erlang shell: c(Module, [native,{hipe,HipeOptions}|MoreOptions]). Use hipe:help_options(). to print out the available options. Mac OS X (Darwin) ----------------- Mac OS X version 10.3.9 (Panther) or later is recommended. Earlier releases of Mac OS X might work, but we have not tested them. On earlier releases, use the "gnutar" command to unpack the sources. (If a non-GNU tar is used, some files will not be correctly extracted and the build will fail.) Erlang/OTP will read the network configuration files in "/etc" at startup. In Darwin these are normally not used by the operating system. The easiest way to force Erlang/OTP avoid reading the files is to put the line (including the ending '.') {lookup,["native"]}. into the "$HOME/.inetrc" file. Make sure that the command "hostname" returns a valid fully qualified host name (this is configured in "/etc/hostconfig"). If you develop linked in drivers (shared library) you need to link using "cc" and the flags "-bundle -flat_namespace -undefined suppress". You also include "-fno-common" in CFLAGS when compiling. Use ".so" as the library suffix. Make and the variable "ERL_TOP" ------------------------------- All the makefiles in the entire directory tree use the environment variable ERL_TOP to find the absolute path of the installation. The configure script will figure this out and set it in the top level Makefile (which, when building, it will pass on). However, when developing it is sometimes convenient to be able to run make in a subdirectory. To do this you must set the ERL_TOP variable before you run make. For example, assume your GNU make program is called "make" and you want to rebuild the application STDLIB, then you could do: cd lib/stdlib; env ERL_TOP= make where would be what you find ERL_TOP is set to in the top level Makefile. More Information ---------------- More information can be found at http://www.erlang.org. For commercial inquires (printed documentation, support, etc) please visit http://www.erlang.se.