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1.1 Unix Installation

We will use as an example the installation for GNU/Linux. The installation for other unix systems is similar. There are several references to ARCH below; these refer to the computer architecture that Scheme is compiled for, either ‘i386’ or ‘x86-64’.

MIT/GNU Scheme is distributed as a compressed ‘tar’ file. The tar file contains both source and binary files; the binary files are pre-compiled Scheme code for a particular computer architecture.

In order to install the software, it’s necessary to configure and compile the C code, then to install the combined C and Scheme binaries. This is done in the following steps:

  1. Unpack the tar file, mit-scheme-VERSION-ARCH.tar.gz, into the directory mit-scheme-VERSION. For example,
    tar xzf mit-scheme-VERSION-i386.tar.gz
    

    will create a new directory mit-scheme-VERSION.

  2. Move into the new directory:
    cd mit-scheme-VERSION/src
    
  3. Configure the software:
    ./configure
    
  4. Build the software:
    make compile-microcode
    
  5. Install the software:
    make install
    

    Depending on configuration options and file-system permissions, you may need super-user privileges to do the installation step.

After installing the software, you can delete the unpacked directory:

cd ../..
rm -rf mit-scheme-VERSION

By default, the software will be installed in /usr/local, in the subdirectories bin and lib. If you want it installed somewhere else, for example /opt/mit-scheme, pass the --prefix option to the configure script, as in ./configure --prefix=/opt/mit-scheme.

The configure script accepts all the normal arguments for such scripts, and additionally accepts some that are specific to MIT/GNU Scheme. To see all the possible arguments and their meanings, run the command ./configure --help.


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