Lessons Learnt : Topspin Quirkies

Although Topspin need not be blamed for it, I can at least resent the fact that it is not 'forward looking' in that, out of the box the software cannot be installed on a 64 bit system and used.

The main problem, it turns out, is the fact that the software expects everyone on the planet to use only a 32-bit operating system with the shared libraries that come with it. This expectation is quickly getting outdated as 'quad core' technology is already showing up in personal computers.   Ok, back to the point.  What was needed to make Topspin work on my Intel 64 bit /Fedora 10 distro ?

1. After installing, start TS, which will dependably crash, complaining that such and such shared library is corrupt. You can identify a 'family' of the library from the error message like "libXsomething.so.2". 
2. With yum make sure that you can list a set of packages correponding to the above library family.  example : 
1. yum search libX
3. Once you confirm that the repository has what you need, simply install the .i386 version of the entire list of packages that yum displayed above for you: 
1. yum install libX*.i386 -y
4. Now, fireup TS again, expect it to crash again, look at the next set of libraries that are missing and loop through the steps 1 to 3 above. Do this, until, you can make Topspin stand on its two (perhaps wobbly) legs.   That's it.

I preferred to list this quick and dirty method instead of recording all the specific libraries I installed to make TS work, because, at the end, the former will turn out to be the more efficient approach if you were ever to resurrect your OS and install TS again (which, from my past experience, will certainly happen).