Settings for multiple operating systems and architectures

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One of the goals of BIRCH is to provide essentially the same capabilities regardless of the version of Unix/Linux, or of machine architecture. In practice, this is currently limited to Solaris/Sparc, Solaris x86 and Linux/Intel, but could be expanded in the future to MacOSX/G4, MacOSX/Intel, and Linux/Sparc, and perhaps others.

The environment variable BIRCH_PLATFORM  tells BIRCH the OS and architecture. When you do a new BIRCH installation, birchconfig automatically uncomments a line in platform.source and platform.profile.source telling which platform is being used. (Really, it is telling the platform on which birchconfig was running when you installed BIRCH.) In the example shown below, BIRCH was set up on a machine with Intel architecture running Linux.

local/platform.source (C-shell family)

setenv BIRCH_PLATFORM linux-intel #setenv BIRCH_PLATFORM linux-x86_64 #setenv BIRCH_PLATFORM solaris-sparc #setenv BIRCH_PLATFORM solaris-amd64

local/platform.profile.source (BOURNE shell family)

BIRCH_PLATFORM=linux-intel #BIRCH_PLATFORM=linux-x86_64 #BIRCH_PLATFORM=solaris-sparc #BIRCH_PLATFORM=solaris-amd64

BIRCH actually has three different ways to determine OS and architectures, found in platform.source and platform.profile.source. Method 1 uses the Unix uname command to determine OS and architecture. Method 2 (the default, illustrated above) sets a single platform. Method 3 is a case statement which sets the platform based on the name of the login host. (Obviously, you have to supply your own names here.) By default, methods 1 and 3 are commented out. To use either methods 1 or 3, simply uncomment the section you wish to use. Don't forget to comment out Method 2!

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