EPICS and EPICS-application distributions

[mooney@aps.anl.gov (Tim Mooney)]

Dear folks,

As you may already know, several EPICS releases are now available (under
password protection) in the SoftwareExchange on WWW (URL:
'http://www.aps.anl.gov/xfd/WWW/xfd/bcda/SoftwareExchange/exchange.html').
For those who don't care to build EPICS, a pre-built (actually just
pieced together) release containing mostly statically linked (for sun4)
executables is available.

An EPICS application tree containing some of our custom EPICS software
(scan, wait, motor, scaler, table, and transform records and device/driver
support; databases and medm display screens) is also available.  This
distribution is intended mostly to support the minimal development
systems we've loaned out to nine of the APS CATs, but it also supports
the Oregon Microsystems VME58-8, and the Joerger VSC8/16 scaler, and has
a very rough first cut at EPICS/HiDEOS support for serial communications.

Via WWW, get into the 'EPICS Releases' section of the Software
Exchange, and download the 'EPICS Prebuilt Release and Extensions' file
(97 MB uncompressed).  Then get into the 'EPICS Application Software'
section and download the 'xfdApp1 for EPICS 3.12.0Beta8' file (3.9 MB
uncompressed).

Via anonymous ftp on epics.aps.anl.gov, cd to
/Public/xfd/ftp/SoftwareExchange/Epics, and download
R3.12.0Beta8_exten_built_sun4.tar.{Z or gz}
cd to
/Public/xfd/ftp/SoftwareExchange/Applications, and download
xfdApp1_3.12.tar.{Z or gz}

In principle, one can simply uncompress and untar files, edit a few
files, type a few commands, and start moving motors and counting
photons.  In practice, of course, there are some sticking points.  Here
are the problems encountered so far (thanks to Pete Jemian, UNI-CAT,
for feedback):

1) The fonts.alias file required by 'medm' is not included in either tar.

Fix:
Append the following lines to your fonts.alias file, and type 'xset fp
rehash'.  To find out where the lines should go, type 'xset q' and look
for fonts.alias in the font path that command prints (probably in
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc).

---cut here----
widgetDM_4      -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--8-60-100-100-c-50-iso8859-1
widgetDM_6      -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--8-60-100-100-c-50-iso8859-1
widgetDM_8      -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--9-80-100-100-c-60-iso8859-1
widgetDM_10     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
widgetDM_12     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-100-100-100-c-70-iso8859-1
widgetDM_14     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-110-100-100-c-70-iso8859-1
widgetDM_16     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-120-100-100-c-90-iso8859-1
widgetDM_18     -sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-120-100-100-c-80-iso8859-1
widgetDM_20     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-140-100-100-c-100-iso8859-1
widgetDM_22     -sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-170-100-100-c-120-iso8859-1
widgetDM_24     -sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-170-100-100-c-120-iso8859-1
widgetDM_30     -adobe-times-medium-r-normal--25-180-100-100-p-125-iso8859-1
widgetDM_36     -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-176-iso8859-1
widgetDM_40     -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-182-iso8859-1
widgetDM_48     -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-182-iso8859-1
widgetDM_60     -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-182-iso8859-1
---cut here----

2) In the (medm display) file .../tmmApp/op/adl/motor_form.adl, motor
tmm:m14 is missing; tmm:m15 appears twice.

Fix: use medm to edit the file.

3) 'Save' and 'Restore' buttons on the main medm display screen 'tmm.adl'
call scripts (.../tmmApp/op/burt/*.sh) containing absolute paths referring
to an APS server.  E.g., restore_parms.sh invokes
'net/phebos/epics/add_on/bin/burtwb'.

Fix: delete absolute paths.  The README file in xfdApp1_3.12.tar tells you
how to put extensions in your search path.

4) Not all of the extensions are statically linked.

Fix:
The following executables in the directory .../epics/extensions/bin/sun4
are linked to shareable libraries that aren't likely to be found on every
sun4 system:

burtconvertsnap
burtgooey
burtmath
burtrb
burtset
burtwb
db2database
dbreport
free_gdct
namecapture
sf2db

You can get statically linked (sun4) copies of these executables by
anonymous ftp from epics.aps.anl.gov, in the /pub/extensionsStatic
or /pub/extensionsStatic/sun4 directories.

5) VxWorks is not included in either file.

Fix:
If you have VxWorks from the EPICS R3.11.3 distribution tape we sent
out last year, you can softlink it in as described in the README file
in xfdApp1_3.12.tar:

# edit the file $EPICS_TOP/config/CONFIG_SITE.  Make sure the variable
# VX_DIR is set to the location of a specific version of VxWorks, in
# your VxWorks distribution directory.  The directory VX_DIR should
# contain 'bin', 'h', 'lib', and 'sun4.68k' subdirectories, among
# others.

Tim Mooney