pvm for DEBIAN ---------------------- The PVM_ROOT environment variable defaults to /usr/lib/pvm3 without user intervention, so users do not need to modify their login scripts. At the moment, only the main PVM library is available as a shared library, the others (fpvm, gpvm, pvmtrc) are static libraries. The easiest way to use pvm is to enable rsh between machines. See 'man rhosts'. After rsh is working, just type 'pvm' on one of the machines, and 'add host1 host2 host3 ...' at the pvm prompt. PVM programs are generally linked with -lpvm3, but this varies from platform to platform. The aimk program is a makefile wrapper that handles many of these differences. To use an alternative remote shell (eg. ssh): ln -sf /usr/bin/ssh /etc/alternatives/pvm-rsh Note that using ssh will not gain you much security as the inter-pvm communications occur over an insecure link, and may be used to start remote processes. If you're not doing parallel computation on a private network (or at least behind a firewall) you are strongly urged to set up a "virtual private network" using IPSEC, ssh/ppp tunnels, or another similar technology. Developers: the pvm3 shared library has been separated out to libpvm3, which is approximately 200K and contains no daemons or other known security risks (pvm<3.4.0-7 had some /tmp problems). It should be safe and inexpensive to include this library on any system if any packages require it (eg. povray). Rather than create pvm- and nopvm- packages it is recommended that you create only one package with PVM support enabled, but only depend on libpvm3. The user can decide whether to install the full pvm package or not. pvm_spawn() will return an error on libpvm3-only nodes, shunting the program into a fallback serial mode if supported. Porters and autocompilers: If the pvm package reports a dependency on itself please remove the old (3.4.0) pvm and pvm-dev packages before building the new 3.4.2+ packages. This is an artifact of the shared library that used to be in the pvm package (now in libpvm3) and the used of ldd in dpkg-shlibdeps used to determine the dependencies at build-time. Drake Diedrich , Wed, 30 Jul 1997 16:00:54 +1000