How I Installed Lisp

Gene Michael Stover

created 18 March 2004
updated 5 April 2004

Copyright © 2004 Gene Michael Stover. All rights reserved. Permission to copy, store, & view this document unmodified & in its entirety is granted.

Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 clisp 2.33 on Plague
• 3 Skipping way ahead
• A. Other File Formats
• Bibliography

1 Introduction

It can be a pain in the ass to install software sometimes. I'm currently experiencing such a pain thanks to the not necessarily good idea of upgrading my main machine the other day. So this is a log of how I got things to work.

This might be of use later:

• so I can do it again in less time, or
• so others can take advantage of what I've learned.

2 clisp 2.33 on Plague

Plague is a laptop, my main machine. It's running Red Hat Enterprise workstation version 3. Here's what Plague is:

$ uname -a
Linux plague 2.4.21-9.0.1.EL #1 Mon Feb 9 22:44:14 EST 2004 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
$

When I attempted to install clisp 2.33 on Plague ``out of the box'' (clisp's box), I saw a segmentation fault. I think it was during the ``make interpreted.mem'' stage. So I backed up, read the installation instructions, & tried again. Here's what I did:

1. Install software that is recommended in the installation instructions. These include:
   1. libsigsegv-2.1

   2. Did not install libiconv because I'm using a glibc that's later than 2.2, so according to the clisp installation notes, I don't need libiconv.

   3. libreadline, version 12 I guess, is already installed.

   4. gettext is already installed.

3 Skipping way ahead

Let's jump way ahead in time. Actually, let's let me just crap out on this article.

I never got clisp to work on Red Hat Enterprise workstation version 3. I even talked to Sam Steingold, the clisp maintainer, on his e-list. Sam made some worthwhile suggestions, but none of them fixed the problem.

So I gave up. No clisp on Plague. I had been a happy clisp user for several years, but now I'm an Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) user.

To make SBCL work as a script language on unix for my web site & other purposes, I had to write a simple wrapper I call lisp-script. I will probably also write a short article about writing portable Lisp code; I had to put portability to practice when I switched to SBCL. Luckily, it wasn't much work.

A. Other File Formats

• This document is available in multi-file HTML format at http://lisp-p.org/hiil/.
• This document is available in Pointless Document Format at http://lisp-p.org/hiil/hiil.pdf.

Bibliography

Sto04

Gene Michael Stover.
Lisp script.
personal web site, April 2004.
http://cybertiggyr.com/gene/hiil/.