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Go to Frequently Asked Questions Homepage Building Prerequisites


OpenSTA Build Prerequisites

These build prerequisites refer to the latest version(s) of the OpenSTA sources, at present this means the CVS HEAD and 1.4.3 source archive. The INSTALL.txt file in the source package you intend to use should be the closest match to those sources and for older OpenSTA will be your best reference. Building older versions is discouraged, especially release archives 1.4.0 and 1.4.1 which are virtually unbuildable. Once we get back on track, these instructions should cover: the CVS HEAD, any current stable release CVS Branch, and the latest stable and unstable source archives.

Note: have to use forward slashes instead of normal Windows backslashes in this doc due to Wiki limitations

Before you start to build OpenSTA you must make sure you have a compatible build system set up. The first step towards this is meeting the basic InstallationPrerequisites for OpenSTA. You then need a compiler and updated system build libraries and headers:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 (with service pack 5 or higher) - Update your VS6 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/previous/vs6/downloads/ None of the development team are using Visual Studio .NET and there have been reports of issues building OpenSTA using it. Unfortunately this is going to cost you money. We're not sure if the limitations in the cheap studenti/introductory edition will stop you building a project the size of OpenSTA or it is just a matter of not being able to redistribute the binaries (If you manage to build using the student/introductory edition please correct this text and let us know)
  • Windows Platform SDK (July 2000 edition) yes we know this is ancient and getting hold of it is practically impossible if you don't have a CD ... sorry. It is a top priority task to get OpenSTA building with the latest Platform SDK, there are known issues. The CVS HEAD now builds (note I make no mention of actually producing working code) against the most current (February 2003) Platform SDK (Core, MDAC and Internet) but requires that STLport 4.6.2 is also used and some special steps are taken, when the 1.5 series is created the latest PSDK will be the recommended build environment. The 1.4 series will continue to recommend to build against the July 2000 Platform SDK for stability reasons.

Some other basic system resources:

  • About 1.5Gb of Disk Space is required for the completely built and populated source tree.
  • Considerable Time to set up and build OpenSTA. As an example, a full clean Release build takes over an hour on a PIII-900/384Mb machine, and this does not include the 3rd party libraries

Some other build related tools:

  • Microsoft HTMLHelp Workshop (tested with version 1.32) Only the htmlhelp.h header and htmlhelp.lib library are required but these are easiest to get as part of the HTMLHelp Workshop installation available freely from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwMicrosoftHTMLHelpDownloads.asp For the OpenSTA build process to find this header and library file you must make sure that Visual Studio knows of the lib/ and include/ directories where HTML Help Workshop was installed, using its Tools>Options>Directories dialog.
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Installer (tested with version 1.1) This is available to Visual Studio owners as a free download from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/tools/vsi11/ The latest Installer software is part of the Platform SDK and is currently on version 2.0. When we update to using the latest Platform SDK we will also be using this Installer tool.
  • Bison/Flex (tested with FG Soup Wizard) Unfortunately the packaged version of Bison and Flex that OpenSTA was originally developed using (the FG soup Wizard) is no longer available on its home site. It is still available from here: ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/crystal/support/msvc/bison_flex/. Any other version of Bison and Flex should work (Cygwin, UnxUtils, etc.) but they all seem to be less than easy to install and we have not yet had chance to test and recommend a specific method. If you do try to build with other Bison/Flex packages you will probably have to change the flex library name in the Tof2Scl project settings. The important part here is that Visual Studio can find the binary and library directories of the installation, these are again settable in the Tools>Options>Directories dialog; it is not be necessary to set these for the FG Soup Bison/Flex as the install copies the binaries and libraries to destinations already on VS6's path.
  • Phoenix (not normally required) This is a CYRANO home grown tool for generating parser code. It is only required if changes are made to the .lex or .par files in the HTMLParser project of OpenSTA. CYRANO created a zip file containing the sources and executable for this this tool the files it generates have been checked into CVS and are part of the source package. If required Phoenix can downloaded from: ftp://ftp.opensta.org/source/phoenix.zip

The OpenSTA sources can either come from:

or

It was once the case that the source root directory must be named ostaw32 to build; this is no longer the case. If you are building from a source archive you must be sure to not unzip below any directories with whitespace in their names, this causes problems for the build; this problem has been fixed in CVS.

3rd Party Libraries Headers and Sources installed in the OpenSTA source tree:

  • STLPort (tested with 4.0) This is not the most current version and again it is a priority to build against the latest and most easily available. The source zip package can be obtained from: http://www.stlport.org/ Unzip this archive into the OpenSTA ext/ directory and rename its root directory to stlport/ . Follow the Win32 build instructions in the INSTALL document, you do not need to do the install step. Visual Studio then needs to set to find the STLPort headers and libraries before the standard Microsoft STL versions. This is acheived using the settings in the Tools>Options>Directories, full instructions are included in the STLPort package. The current CVS HEAD will now build against STLport 4.6.2 but the 1.4 series of OpenSTA will continue to recommend building against 4.0 for stability sake. If you want to build using a current version of Microsofts Platform SDK then you must use STLport 4.6.2 and also must uncomment the _STLP_NEW_PLATFORM_SDK_ line in the stl_user_config.h file. STLport 4.6.2 will be in the recommended build platform for the 1.5 series of OpenSTA.
  • omniORB (must be 3.0.4) The source archive can be downloaded from: http://prdownloads.sf.net/omniorb/omniORB_304.tar.gz Unpack this archive into ext/ and rename its root directory to omniorb/ . Build following the instructions included in the README.win32 file. Note that omniORB must be built after STLPort so that its build uses the STLPort library. You may be tempted to download the binary release but experience has taught us that this is a mistake, the resulting OpenSTA will initially look like it works but you will have strange and intermittent problems, usually relating to the Name Server. It is important that you use the specific version given unless you want to do quite a bit of extra work, the version number is part of the library name.
  • ucd-snmp/net-snmp (tested with 4.2.6) Get the source tar.gz archive from: http://prdownloads.sf.net/net-snmp Unpack this archive into ext/ and rename its root directory to ucd-snmp/ . The Win32 Release build config of the libsnmp_dll project is the only required element from the Visual C++ workspace in the win32 directory. No tests have been done with any of the net-snmp 5 releases.
  • CodeMax (tested with 2.1.0.24) The CodeMax project has officially been retired and is no longer available from its home site. Luckily a group of users are maintaining an archive of the code and providing some bugfixes, there is a big catch though, to access the archives you must become a member of the Codemax Yahoo group, see: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/codemax/ and this group is no longer taking new members - it has become a private group. The CodeMax archive is in this groups "Files" section. Once retrieved, unpack this archive into the provided directory named ext/Codemax/. The default package contains the ready built library and headers in the top directory, the OpenSTA Release build will look for them there. Probably the best way to get this archive now is to ask on the DeveloperMailingList and someone will get a copy to you, it's license bans public distribution :-( If you can help switching to an alternative then please volunteer.
  • SizeCBar (tested with 2.44) Get the source zip archive from: http://www.datamekanix.com/sizecbar/ Unpack this archive into ext\ and rename its root directory to sizecbar\. The OpenSTA build will use these source files and no build is required.

You've probably noticed going through these prerequisites that it is important that Visual Studio gets its search paths set correctly in the Tools>Options>Directories dialog. The order and content is important for a successful build, they should look something like this:

Show directories for: Executable files

 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Platform SDK/bin/winnnt
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Platform SDK/bin
 C:/Program Files/BisonFlex/bin
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/Common/MSDev98/Bin
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/Bin
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/Common/Tools
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/Common/Tools/winnt
 C:/WINDOWS/system32
 C:/WINDOWS
 C:/WINDOWS/system32/Wbem

Show directories for: Include files

 C:/OpenSTA/ostaw32/ext/stlport/stlport
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Platform SDK/include
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/include
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/MFC/include
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/ATL/include
 C:/Program Files/Html Help Workshop/include

Show directories for: Library files

 C:/OpenSTA/ostaw32/ext/stlport/lib
 C:/Program Files/BisonFlex/lib
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Platform SDK/lib
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/lib
 C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/VC98/MFC/lib
 C:/Program Files/Html Help Workshop/lib

Of course your actual settings depend on your specific installation and may have slightly different PATHs or contain more entries.

Once all this is set up you are ready to Build OpenSTA.

If you have any questions about the above information, or suggestions how to do things better please discuss on the DeveloperMailingList


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