New BIRCH Installation


BIRCH Home Directory - There should probably never be a reason to change this variable! This should ALWAYS be the parent directory of install-birch ie. the directory in which framework.tar.gz was saved. The only reason this chooser exists is if birchconfig made an error in finding the parent directory, which shouldn't happen.

BIRCH can be installed in any directory owned by the person running birchconfig.However,  it's simplest if this is the home directory of the BIRCH Administrator. Alternatively, /usr/local/birch would also work.

miniBIRCH Master Directory (used ONLY with miniBIRCH) - This is the directory containing the master copy of BIRCH. During a miniBIRCH installation, birchconfig will create symbolic links to the Master Directory. Links will be made to bin, lib, and script directories, as well as other directories that
do not need to be modified by the BIRCH administrator. Thus, someone installing miniBIRCH in a classroom setting will have what appears to be a full working copy of BIRCH, when in fact all they have is the critical administration directories (eg. admin, local etc.).

Userid of BIRCH Administrator - It is strongly recommended that a separate account be set up for the BIRCH administrator. In particular, the administrator shoud NOT be root.

Email address of BIRCH Administrator - Fully-qualified email address of BIRCH administrator. This has no effect on how the programs function, but it will be substituted into the HTML documentation. For example, if the BIRCH administrator is 'birch', the address might be something like 'birch@myhost.org'. If this is not your main email address, is probably still a good idea to use it, but to set mail forwarding to your main email address.

Default platform - Platform is the combination of operating system and architecture. This should be automatically determined and you shouldn't have to change it. If you plan to support logins for several platforms, you need to edit the file platform.source and platform.profile.source in the $BIRCH/local/admin directory.

Special note on linux-intel vs. linux-x86_64

birchconfig is at present not able to distinguish between 32-bit linux on 32 bit  architecture, 32-bit linux on 64 bit architecture, and 64-bit linux on 64-bit architecture.  The New BIRCH Installation window will automatically set the default platform to linux-intel for all Linux systems. You can manually set the default platform as follows:
If you are using this platform
 Set the default platform to
32-bit linux on 32-bit architecture
 linux-intel
32-bit linux on 64-bit architecture
 linux-intel
64-bit linux on 64-bit architecture
 linux-x86_64*

* linux-intel will also work on a full 64-bit platform.