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Other Useful Tips & Tricks

The Fastest free FORTRAN
If you're running a well-established legacy scientific or technical FORTRAN application on a mainframe and happy with the results it's the right time to save money by migrating to modern PCs that have the performance of the old mainframe for a fraction of the cost. If you're going to buy time on a high-performance Linux grid, it will be useful to run a proof-of-concept of your application on the PC first. Fedora Core 5, Intel, and this article will give you such an opportunity by using the methods described below.

How To Choose the Fastest FORTRAN
You may want to run dwhet.f from my site www.myjavaserver.com/~akrivitsky/G77.html with different compilers and compare the results. Please see my article in JDJ Vol 10, issue 5, 2005, pp 16-18 (also available online at http://jdj.sys-con.com/read/83099.htm) on performance measurement.

Solving Intel FORTRAN 9.0 environmental problems
If you don't use your application for commercial purposes (for example, if you're trying different compilers to find the right one) you may want to use Intel FORTRAN. Intel Fortran 9.0 for non-commercial use is currently available from www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/compilers/flin/219857.htm. From a pure performance point-of-view it's the fastest free FORTRAN compiler at the moment. To make sure that this statement is correct you are welcome to try several of them with Dwhetstone. The path update can be done easy in .bash_profile. One has to write:
PATH=$PATH:/opt/intel/fc/9.0/binExport PATH.

However, there's a problem using it under Fedora Core 5. We need to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable. You can do it in a special .sh file called instead of ifort, but it's inconvenient. Trying to set up this variable in instance .profile or some other file will go to nowhere.

The solution is to put it into .bashrc file like this:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/intel/fc/9.0/lib"

After that you'll be able to run Intel FORTRAN and executables produced by this compiler under Fedora Core 5 without any problem.

Apache Web Server and cgi Scripts
Fedora Core 5 is shipped with Apache web server 2.2. The manual can be found at /var/www/manual/index.html and read with FireFox or Konqueror. To run the server one needs to issue the command /usr/sbin/apachectl -k start. You may want to put this command in a special .sh file and create a launcher using this file on a Gnome desktop. A similar thing can be useful to stop Apache, only this time the command will be /usr/sbin/apachectl -k stop. Default location of html documents for Apache 2.2 localhost is /var/www/html.

Default location of cgi scripts is /var/www/cgi-bin.

Export cgi-scripts from XP to Fedora Core 5: Problem Solved
From time to time all of us will meet infamous 500 error while exporting PERL scripts from one operating system to another one. In our case the problem can arise when exporting from XP to Fedora Core 5. Here's some simple advice that will save you countless hours of debugging. Try the dos2unix command. Yes, it's as simple as that. Most problems with scripts that runs perfectly okay under the Apache server on Windows XP and refuses to compile under Fedora Core 5 will disappear after dos2unix is run.

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