Notes on installing foma

From source

Get the source tarball, unpack it, or get the svn version with

svn co http://foma.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/foma/

and run

make; sudo make install

This should work on most Unix boxes, including Mac OSX. In case you have an older version of flex and bison and the source refuses to build, you can try updating the pre-built parser files with

touch *.c *.h

before running make if flex or bison complains. Note that this only works with the tarball distribution since the svn doesn't contain the pre-built lexer and parser files.

To build, foma requires the readline and zlib libraries, which should be present on most systems. It also uses flex (>=2.5.35) and bison for its parser. However, the tarball distribution comes with the parser files pregenerated. For building from the svn, flex and bison are needed on the system.

Linux binaries

If you have trouble compiling on linux, you can try the pre-built binaries for linux (32 and 64 bit). They include statically linked executables (foma,flookup,cglookup) and the include/ and lib/-files. These two directories you can ignore if you're not developing with the API.

Mac OSX (binary)

Unpack the binary. Move foma and flookup to a suitable binary directory in your path. E.g. open a terminal in a directory with the files and do:

sudo cp ./foma /usr/bin/
sudo cp ./flookup /usr/bin/

The build is compiled for OSX versions >= 10.4.

Windows

The windows binary versions are compiled using cygwin (but do not require cygwin to run). However, this means, the system command within foma doesn't work outside cygwin.