Re-engineering portabililty of the Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS)

Abstract

The Computer-Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) currently runs only on SPARC workstations ruling SunOS version 4.1.3. This limits the usefulness of CAPS, since Sun Microsystems has publicly announced that they have no interest in continuing support for SunOS version 4.x. A solution to this problem is to port CAPS to a PC platform running the Linux operating system. Towards this end, the graphical editor portion of CAPS was ported onto a 100Mhz Pentium, with 32 MB of RAM, Linux 3.0, running Motif 2.0 on X windows. Modifications to both, the Makefile and the graphical editor source code were required for a successful compilation. These modifications were items such as having to compile using various compilers, providing pointers to the Motif and X windows Libraries needed to produce the static builds of the graphical editor, and a number of recompilations of the Linux kernel. As a result of these efforts, the graphical editor, a functional component of CAPS, was successfully ported to this system. The software database, project control and execution support components still remain to be ported as a future development