INSTALL

=================================================================
Hardware requirements:
  Right now, the only hardware that is explicitly supported is
x86. However, with a good amount of work, you can probably get
it to compile on many other machines so long as a recent release
of GMP is available. Franke's lattice siever explicitly supports
several different platforms and has pure-c files as well, but you'll
have to move some symbolic links and expect to need some minor
tweaks to the source code. There are several tweaks that the rest
of the GGNFS code will need as well - replace blanczos64.c with the
non-mmx version, and replace the two small assembler files with 
C equivalents or assembler for your machine (neither are available,
and I have no plans to make either available, as I am using this
software soley on x86 and do not have the time to support other
machines).

  Although some folks have managed to tweak the source code and
do general c100 factorizations with as little as 128MB RAM, the
bare minimum amount of RAM is probably about 256MB for small
factorizations (say, GNFS <= 100, SNFS <= 130), 512MB for
small-medium sized (say, GNFS <= 120, SNFS <= 155), and 1GB 
for larger. Sieving can be done on nearly any box, but relation
processing and the matrix code definitely need at least these
amounts of RAM (although, if you know what you're doing with
parameter choices and such, there are clever ways to reduce the
RAM needed by the matrix step at the expense of needing more 
sieving).
  Finally, you'll need a good amount of free disk space - HDs
are so cheap now, you have no excuse for not having several GB
of free space, but you'll surely need at least 500 MB for small
factorizations, 1GB for medium sized.

=================================================================
OS Requirements:
  You'll need a Linux or *nix-like environment to compile 
this code in any straightforward way. Right now, (v.0.50-ish) 
it is known to compile ok under Fedora Core 2 and Cygwin. Please
note: Greg Childers points out that under Cygwin, text-file mode
must be set to UNIX; otherwise, the compilation may appear fine,
but it will most likely be broken! (Ok - I'm not sure if this is
the case anymore - I think the MingW32 fixes may have also fixed
this problem).

  If you are fortunate enough to be running Linux and have a recent
(say, 4.1+) release of GMP already installed, just do `make' from
the toplevel and you should be good to go. You'll also need Perl
installed to run the Perl script (which is recommended, at least while
you're getting started). The script is known to work with version 5.8,
and is known not to work with 5.2. 

  Before doing a `make', have a look at the choices of Makefiles
available; right now, they are just Makefile.athlon and Makefile.x86.
The only difference is the -march flag to gcc which will try to schedule
instructions in a good order for your processor (according to the
man pages, these options may also use processor-specific instructions,
but I haven't seen this happen; that is, I haven't witnessed gcc using
any MMX or SSE/2 instructions, so I suspect that a compilation done
with Makefile.athlon should work fine on a PII for example). This
also will not affect sieving speed, as the important stuff there is coded
in assembly already - but the compiler options will affect relation
processing speed, Lanczos speed and the final square root speed. So
it's worth taking a look if you know what you're doing with those options.

  Finally, and most importantly: You need to have GMP 4.x installed
on your system, and you need the standard development stuff
(gcc, make,...). There are a few scripts around that automatically
run the binaries to factor an integer, and plot data and such 
using gnuplot. For these, you need to have bash installed, and if you
want the plots you need gnuplot.

  That said, you should be able to do a `make' in the toplevel directory.
But the Makefile's are kinda funny: if it fails from the toplevel,
try going into the src/ directory and doing a `make'. In either case,
nothing will be installed system wide - it will just build binaries and 
leave them (or links to them) in the src/ directory.

No Symbolic links?
  If your platform does not support symbolic links in any usual way
(i.e., Win2k users seem to have some problems with this), you'll need
to account for this:
(1) Rename the directory "src/lasieve4/piii/" to "src/lasieve4/asm".
(2) Rename one of the "Makefile.*" files to be simply "Makefile".
(2) After compilation, you'll probably need to copy or move the lattice
    siever binaries (src/lasieve4/gnfs-lasieve4I12e and similar)
    to the directory src/ , so that the factorization scripts will be
    able to find them.

===================================================================
USAGE:
  Read the documentation for the maximum amount of available information.
  But for a quick start,
  (1) Compile.
  (2) Adjust the GGNFS_BIN_PATH variable in tests/factLat.pl.
  (3) Look in the tests/tst250 directory for an example of a small gnfs
      factorization or in tests/testS1 for a small snfs example.
  (4) Run some slightly larger numbers, experimenting with parameter
      choices while simultaneously reading/skimming relevent parts
      of the documentation to get a feel for how everything works.

  Also, note: it's not entirely clear to me what the minimum version
of Perl should be (since I have only used the script with one version). 
But it's known NOT to work with 5.2, and it DOES work with 5.8.3.