Dear Bionetters,
to be independent from our computer at the institute, I ordered the
Alpha-Unix/Linux version of Paup4 for my private computer at home. It
is an LX164 with 21164a-CPU with RedHat Linux 5.2 on one disk and a still
rudimentary Debian potato consisting of nearly nothing but the base system
on a second harddrive. RedHat runs with kernel 2.2.12 with a modified line
in the source code to fix a memory bug.
On my computer the Paup4 binary refuses to be executed. It is labelled as
executable for user and group. "File filename" gives the proper information
(COFF format alpha executable paged not stripped etc.). Filesize is correct,
it does not seem to have been corrupted during ftp-download. I did not yet
copy it into /usr/local/bin, but I always gave bash a path, tried as
user and as root. Bash always says: Cannot execute binary (I tried RedHat and
potato). Gdb complains about missing debug symbols, so no help available
from here.
This is what strace says:
root at alphons/molbio# strace -f -v paup4b4a-alpha-unix/paup4
execve("paup4b4a-alpha-unix/paup4", ["paup4b4a-alpha-unix/paup4"], [/*
17 vars */]) = 0
strace: exec: Exec format error
Since I am no programmer, I have no idea, whether this is a useful
information or not. Has anybody an idea what the problem might be or a
suggestion, what else I might try to find out?
I have been in contact with the Paup support. They told me, that they have
several users around with a similar composition of hardware and OS and Paup
would work on these machines. After clearing all the items I already
mentioned, they seem run out of ideas. Since I´ve got a dialup connection, I
cannot simply open an account for them to login and have experiments on
their own. Bringing the computer to the institute and connect it to the
BioLAN wouldn´t work either. AFAIK, it is not possible without account on
the mainframes of the computing center to connect from outside directly to
the institutes.
It might still be, that the bug sits in front of the keyboard ...
But perhaps somebody has an idea?
Thank you in advance,
regards,
Kerstin Hoef-Emden
--
kerstin.hoef-emden at uni-koeln.de
