A.1 Prerequisite tools

The GNU Autotools make use of a few additional tools to get their jobs done. This makes it necessary to gather all of the prerequisite tools to get started. Before installing GNU Autotools, it is necessary to obtain and install these tools.

The GNU Autotools are all built around the assumption that the system will have a relatively functional version of the Bourne shell. If your system is missing a Bourne shell or your shell behaves different to most, as is the case with the Bourne shell provided with Ultrix, then you might like to obtain and install GNU bash. See section A.2 Downloading GNU Autotools, for details on obtaining GNU packages. If you are using a Windows system, the easiest way to obtain a Bourne shell and all of the shell utilities that you will need is to download and install Cygnus Solutions' Cygwin product. You can locate further information about Cygwin by reading http://www.cygnus.com/cygwin/.

Autoconf requires GNU M4. Vendor-provided versions of M4 have proven to be troublesome, so Autoconf checks that GNU M4 is installed on your system. Again, see section A.2 Downloading GNU Autotools, for details on obtaining GNU packages such as M4. At the time of writing, the latest version is 1.4. Earlier versions of GNU M4 will work, but they may not be as efficient.

Automake requires Perl version 5 or greater. You should download and install a version of Perl for your platform which meets these requirements.