Killing Mind

Here is what I did to get SNNSv4.2 to build on Cygwin. Someone may wish to improve my methods and submit them back to the authors. For now, this should get you through.

• Run the Cygwin setup program and make sure Bison and X11 are installed. In particular the xorg-x11-devel package is necessary. Other packages are necessary too, but I already had them installed.
• Download and uncompress SNNSv4.2.
• Run ./configure in the extracted SNNSv4.2 directory. I passed in the --enable-global flag to enable installation in /usr/local/bin, but that’s up to you.
• The first change is to define MAXSHORT and friends. Cygwin calls these constants SHRT_MAX etc. (as defined in limits.h). The best place I found to make the change is in SNNSv4.2/kernel/sources/glob_typ.h. There could be a better place.

I added these lines:

 #include <limits.h>
 #define MAXSHORT SHRT_MAX
 #define MINSHORT SHRT_MIN
 #define MININT INT_MIN
 #define MAXINT INT_MAX

• Next, Cygwin does not define the SIGIOT signal. Rather than make it up when there’s probably a good reason it is not defined, I removed reference to it from SNNS. To do so, I commented out line 393 of SNNSv4.2/tools/sources/snnsbat.c. It looks like a catch-all line anyway.

snnsbat.c:393

//  signal( SIGIOT,  emergency_exit );

• Now it appears that if the X11 libraries are installed when you run the configure script, all will run smoothly. If instead, you get a linker error at the last step, edit Makefile.def to include the X libs directory:

Makefile.def:97

X_LIBS             =  -L/usr/X11R6/lib

• Run make, then if you wish, make install. I ended up moving all the SNNS executables (there’s analyze, batchman, convert2snns, feedback-gennet, ff_bignet, isnns, linknets, mkhead, mkout, mkpat, netlearn, netperf, pat_sel, pat_sel_simple, snns2c, snnsbat, td_bignet and xgui) into their own directory and just created a symlink to xgui.

• Start X using startx, and from within the xterm, run xgui.

Leave a comment if you try these steps.