Installing NCL under Linux systems

Before you read this document, you should see the main document on installing NCL. This document provides additional notes for Linux systems only.

If you are installing pre-compiled NCL binaries on a Linux system, there may be a number of binaries to choose from. To know which ones to select, type the following to get the type of system you have, and the version of gcc:

  uname -m
  gcc --version

If these two comands report "i686" and "4.1.1", then you need to download the Linux binary for an i686 system running gcc version 4.1.1. If you don't have exactly this version of gcc, then try the closest in version (for example, download the 4.1.2 binary if you have 4.1.1).

This binary will be labeled on the ESG page as something like:

NCL 5.1.1 32-bit binary for i686 chips for LINUX (compiled with gcc 4.1.2)

Note that your exact version of gcc may not be in the list. As long as it is close, you should be okay. If you have an older version of gcc, this may still work, but then you may also need to deal with a potential missing libgfortran issue.

As an example, if the above two commands report "x86_64" and "3.4.6", then the closest binary is:

NCL 5.1.1 64-bit binary for x86_64 chips for LINUX (compiled with gcc 3.3.0)

If these two commands report "ia64" and "4.2.2", then the closest match is:

NCL 5.1.1 64-bit binary for IA64 chips for LINUX (compiled with gcc 4.1.2)

and so on.