Installing Mb-System on Fedora 17

MB-System is the only fully open-source software I am aware of for swath sonar data including multibeam and sidescan backscatter. As such, I'm really hoping using it works out for me!

Compiling it on a fresh install of Fedora 17 wasn't that straight-forward (took me about 5 hours to figure all this out), so I thought I'd put together a little how-to for the benefit of myself, and hopefully you.

I've broken it down into a few stages so some sort of semblance of order can be imposed on this random collection of installation notes.

Step 1: download the software from ftp server here

In the terminal:

For me this created a folder called 'mbsystem-5.3.1982'

Step 2: install pre-requisites

A) Generic Mapping Tools (GMT). You need to go to the Downloads tab, then click on the INSTALL FORM link. This will take you to a page where you can download the installation script, and fill in an online form of your parameter settings which you can submit and save the resulting page as a textfile which becomes the input to the bash script. Sounds confusing, but it's not - the instructions on the page are adequate. I opted to allow GMT to install netCDF for me. Then in the terminal I did this:

B) Perl parallel forkmanager:

C) X11

D) openmotif

E) fftw

F) ghostview - I had to install this indirectly using kde3:

(Note to Fedora - why oh why oh why are B, C, and F above not installed by default!?)

G)  OTPSnc tidal prediction software: download from here

untar, and cd to the directory

first double check that ncdump and ncgen are installed (which ncdump ncgen)

then edit the makefile so it reads:

then in the terminal issue:

Hopefully this compiles without errors, then I moved them to a executable directory:

H) openGL libraries (again I had to do this indirectly, this time through mesa):

Step 3: prepare mbsystem makefiles

cd mbsystem-5.3.1982/

You have to go in and point install_makefiles to where all your libraries are. This is time-consuming and involves a lot of ls, which, and whereis!

Here's a copy of the lines I edited in my install_makefiles parameters:

Then in the terminal

Step 3: install mbsystem

first I had to do this (but you may not need to)

I then updated my ~/.bashrc so the computer can find all these lovely new files:

Test the install by issuing



you should see the manual pages come up. Right, now down to the business of multibeam analysis!