How to install 32-bit Poplog on 32-bit or 64-bit linux
Instructions for DOWNLOADING and INSTALLING 32-bit Poplog are below.
What is Poplog?
Poplog is a multi-language software development environment that has proved
itself useful for teaching absolute beginners programming and AI, and supporting
major commercial software projects, including Clementine a leading
user-extendable data-mining toolkit in the 1990s, later incorporated into IBM's
business development software. "Poplog" was a trade-mark of the University of
Sussex from about 1983 to 2015.
The core language of Poplog is Pop-11, derived from the Edinburgh University POP-2 Programming language developed for AI research in the 1970s.
The other languages are all implemented in Pop-11.
Some online information about the Pop-11 language:
The Pop-11 Primer
Pop-11 uses a virtual machine with compiler tools available at run time, that
can support a variety of very different incrementally compiled programming
languages.
Poplog is supplied with implementations of three additional well known
languages, Prolog, Common Lisp, and Standard ML, but particular applications can
include application-specific languages implemented in Pop-11. An example is the
Poprulebase language used in the SimAgent toolkit:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/help/poprulebase
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/packages/simagent.html
See also:
For background information on the contents of the Poplog system
and the teaching materials included, see
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html#whatspoplog
For more on available teaching materials, and online tutorials see
For information on other versions of poplog available see:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html#contents
Partial Poplog: Poplog for windows users
If you do not have access to a machine running linux you may be able to
run poplog (possibly a reduced version) on windows, as explained in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/winpop/
This file is accessible as:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/latest-poplog/
That link should always get the latest version of 32 bit linux poplog.
Since December 2019, for 64-bit linux poplog see
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/V16/AREADME.htmlMinor updates may be included without altering this file or the version number.
For information about recent changes see:
(may need some updating)
- Linux Poplog Update history
(Now in a separate file)- CHANGES.txt
Changes to the main poplog system. Included in Poplog.- CHANGES-PACKAGES.txt
Changes to Package subsystems. Included in Poplog.Instructions for downloading, and information about pre-requisites, are in the next section.
Download and install scripts are provided both for Fedora (which should also work for other RedHat-based versions of linux) and for Ubuntu (which may work for other Debian-based versions of linux). The scripts should enable 32-bit Poplog to work on 64-bit or 32-bit Linux systems. (64-bit Poplog details are at the top of this page.)
Because these scripts also install linux system packages, they need to be run as root (superuser) or using the 'sudo' command. So, after fetching the script, make it executable using 'chmod', e.g.
sudo chmod 755 script-name
Then run the script, e.g. using the instruction format:
sudo ./script-name
Fetch the appropriate script, using your browser's 'save as' option, or using
the 'wget' command with the URL.
Each script first installs a collection of linux library packages required for poplog to run, then fetches a new (fetch-and-install) script from here, which can then be run to download and install poplog. That fetch-and-install script available below can be used with any version of linux on which the required packages (listed below for Fedora and Ubuntu) have already been installed.
This can be downloaded by hand, made executable, and run, if you have already installed the required linux packages. It fetches a tar file (size about 17MB) and unpacks it into a directory (/usr/local/poplog, which it creates if necessary), then adds some links in that directory to the newly installed files, and finally runs an installation script that builds 'saved images' to go into the 'popsavelib' directory, to make available usable versions of Pop11, Prolog, Common Lisp and Standard ML, and multi window version XVed of the poplog editor Ved. By default it installs saved images for two demonstration programs (a chatbot, eliza, and a mini blocks world demo, partly inspired by Terry Winograd's SHRDLU program (around 1971).
Packages required for Ubuntu (and similar Debian-based versions
of linux):
Request for help
Anyone with information about the names of corresponding 32-bit packages
required for other versions of linux should post them to
a.sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk
Thanks!
yum install blas-devel.i686 lapack-devel.i686
Ubuntu:
apt-get install libblas-dev:i386 liblapack-dev:i386
That can be done at any time after installing Poplog.
ARCH LINUX USERS
NEW 25 May 2012:
(not yet fully tested)
Peter has produced this script, which may suffice for knowledgeable Arch users:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/po/poplog/PKGBUILD
Arch users wishing to get the latest poplog directly from here should be able to install
it provided that
(a) if 64-bit arch is in use then the Multilib facilities will have to be enabled
as described in
http://www.archlinux.org/news/true-multilib-for-arch-linux-x86_64/
(b) a collection of libraries has been installed, especially xterm, and
'lib32-libxext' 'lib32-libxt' 'lib32-openmotif' 'lib32-libxp' 'tcsh'
and optionally 'espeak' (useful for some of the demos).
Try downloading and running this script, which will attempt to install
the above packages, then give you the option to abort or continue, then
install poplog in /usr/local/poplog (plus a few symbolic links):
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/latest-poplog/get-arch-poplog
NOTE: Other versions of linux
either
motif
or
lesstif
E.g. you should be able to install one of those using 'yum install'
in RedHat/Fedora systems and similar systems, e.g. CentOS, Scientific Linux:
yum install lesstif-devel.i686
Make sure that you have the 'devel' packages for the X11 libraries
installed. Otherwise the link commands in the poplog installation
scripts will fail. E.g. you could use the following, in addition
to the commands for installing motif (or lesstif):
yum install libX11-devel.i686 libXt-devel.i686 libXext-devel.i686
If you would like to try the linear algebra package included in the popvision
library mentioned above ($usepop/pop/packages/popvision)
then, if you are a Fedora user, add this command to install the BLAS and LAPACK
linear algebra libraries:
yum install blas-devel.i686 lapack-devel.i686
For Ubuntu that would be
apt-get install libblas-dev:i386 liblapack-dev:i386
That can be done after installing Poplog. Users of other versions of linux will
have to investigate what commands are required.
(Automatically done if you use one of the "get-and-install" scripts described above.)The file CHECK_LINUX_FACILITIES can be downloaded, made executable, and then run to check that you have an installation on which poplog can be installed (current version only for Fedora-type or Ubuntu-type linux):
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/latest-poplog/CHECK_LINUX_FACILITIES
After downloading it do this to make it executable, then run it:chmod 755 CHECK_LINUX_FACILITIES ./CHECK_LINUX_FACILITIES
NOTE: use of motif/lesstif
The graphical facilities in Poplog are all based on the X window system (sometimes also called X11), described here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_SystemThis has the great advantage of supporting remote use of graphical tools: the tools can run on a machine in one location while users are using a machine connected to it by a network. This is now commonplace using web browsers, but the X window system, based on Unix, had the idea long before there were web browsers. Poplog provides a wide range of 2-D graphical facilities based on X. There are some library packages that extend the X facilities and one of those is the 'motif' widget toolkit, which is used by many tools that run on linux and unix. It is described here.
A royalty free version is OpenMotif described here. Some unix distributors object to licence conditions of both Motif and OpenMotif and have switched to using an open source non-proprietary replacement called Lesstif, described here. Lesstif is almost fully compatible with Motif, but not quite, and this has caused minor problems for poplog, now fixed.
Users wishing to try the 64 bit version of Linux Poplog will find information
about the package and the required tar files here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/V16/AREADME.html
(Updated December 2019, providing the newly packaged 64 bit Poplog.)
Alternatively explore Waldek Hebisch's poplog pages:
http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~hebisch/poplog/
However, most 64-bit linux AMD64 systems or equivalent (e.g. x86_64) should support 32 bit applications, provided that you install the required 32 bit libraries before installing poplog. So the installation procedures for Fedora and Ubuntu introduced above, should install 32-bit poplog on 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Linux, which may be the simplest option.
The RCLIB graphical extension to Poplog, described here, was designed to work without Motif.
However there are some advantages in the use of Poplog with motif, insofar as the graphical version of the editor, XVed, then has menu buttons and a scrollbar if Motif or Lesstif is available.
The original contents of this section are now out of date, as the procedures and scripts have been simplified. See the up to date versions above.
This file maintained by:
Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/
Last Updated:
5 Aug 2009;22 Jan 2010;12 Aug 2010; 26 Dec 2011; 29 Apr
2012 ;14 Oct 2015; 8 Jan 2020