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Unable To Install Sift On Macosx

Hi,

Does anyone have any success installing SIFT on MacOSX 10.6? I could really use some advice.

Thanks!

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updated by Pauline Ng • Pauline Ng • written by Sam • Sam

Some clue as to the nature of your problem would probably go some way toward helping people provide you with answers.

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written by Simon Cockell Simon Cockell

Might help to explain briefly what SIFT is (with a URL) and state the exact problem with installation (e.g. are you getting an error message?)

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written by Neilfws Neilfws

from my experience, this QA format is not very good for debugging installation problems, also sift is seemingly only supported on windows and linux. Maybe ask the authors first? Another approach could be to run it in a VirtualBox.

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written by Michael Dondrup Michael Dondrup

I had a 10 minute attempt to get this working this morning (not very thorough I admit). Michael is right, OS X is unsupported, and although I suspect installation may be possible if you are prepared to work your way through a number of opaque GCC errors, it would actually probably be simpler to install it in a VM running Linux... OS X may be a certified Unix these days, but it is far from a typical Linux :)

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written by Simon Cockell Simon Cockell

I tried it, but the code is simply bad, not portable and there is no Makefile. There is a readme, but compiling using gcc doesn't work. I would think it's almost impossible to get this running.

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written by Michael Dondrup Michael Dondrup

Thanks for your help everyone. Yea this code is very difficult to get up and running. I'm even experiencing trouble installing it on a linux box

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written by Sam • Sam

1 answer

Hi Daniel,

This is Pauline Ng, original author of SIFT. We have installed [SIFT on the Amazon Cloud](, so if you are having problems installing it, then you can start an instance of it on Amazon Web Services, with SIFT pre-installed. Instructions are here.

Right now, we are supporting the sequence submission and BLink submission, as those are the programs that people have the most problem with for installation. (Using the pre-computed databases are simple perl scripts with sql queries that you shouldn't have any problems with.)

You will have to pay 34 cents per hour to Amazon to use it (the instructions have a link to pricing).

Best,
Pauline
http://sift-dna.org

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updated by Ram Ram • written by Pauline Ng • Pauline Ng

That is a nice paraphrasing for 'it doesn't compile on macos' right? ;)

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written by Michael Dondrup Michael Dondrup

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