Installation

System Requirements

METAL-MLEE has been developed and tested for SPARC computers running the Solaris operating system, however it will work on most LINUX and probably also other UNIX systems. It also works on a MS-Windows (32-bit) system with the support of the free cygwin software (see www.cygwin.com). The known limitations of functionality for certain configurations and operating systems are mentioned in Section 5 and in the descriptions of the individual programs. The functionality under MS Windows is restricted due to poor support for ressource limitation and CPU time profiling that is available on the command level for this family of operating systems (the CygWin package only provides a subset of the functionality needed to fully support all features of METAL-MLEE).

Software Requirements

The following software is needed to be installed on your system in order for METAL-MLEE to work.

• Perl version 5.000 or higher. The perl command must be in the binary search path. For the Perl-scripts to work as commands, the perl binary or a link to it must be available in /usr/local/bin. Otherwise, the scripts must be invoked using the perl scriptname syntax.
• A C/C++ compiler, preferably gcc/g++ This is not needed if you have a computer with one of the hardware architectures and operating systems for which precompiled binaries are included (see below)
• Gnu make version 3.77 or higher (earlier version might work but have not been tested). This is only needed if you need to compile binaries yourself.
• XLISPSTAT version 3.51 or higher. XLISPSTAT is a portable LISP system with statistical functions, it is available from http://www.stat.umn.edu/~luke/xls/xlsinfo/xlsinfo.html. The xlispstat command must be in the binary search path.

• the program md5sum from the free portable GNU textutils package. This package can be obtained from http://www.gnu.org/software/textutils/textutils.html. This program is not essential, however. If it is missing, no MD5 hashes will be calculated for the databases. The md5sum command should be in the binary search path. If it is not, the location can be specified in the configuration file config.pm. The subdirectory /src/md5 also contains a version of that program that can be built and installed into the bin subdirectory using make. To use that version, config.pm needs to be adapted accordingly.
• In addition you need one or more learning algorithms for use with METAL-MLEE (see Section 6 for more information on the requirements for learning algorithms).

On most LINUX or UNIX-like systems perl, md5sum, a compiler, and make will already be installed.

For MS-Windows computers, the easiest way to get all these for free is to install the CygWin software package (www.cygwin.com).

Obtaining and Installing the Program

METAL-MLEE is distributed as gzipped tarballs from www.metal-kdd.org/downloadi_all.php. You must download the sources as mlee-metal-src.tgz. Optionally, you can download precompiled binaries for x86/linux (mlee-metal-binpclinux.tgz), x86/windows with cygwin (mlee-metal-binpccygwin.tgz) or sparc/solaris (mlee-metal-binsparcsolaris.tgz).

Uncompress and extract the archive mlee-metal-src.tgz. This will create a directory with the name mlee that contains several subdirectories.

If you also downloaded an archive with binaries, uncompress and extract this one too - it will create an additional subdirectory binpccygwin, binpclinux, or binsparcsolaris within the mlee directory. Change into that directory and check if you can run the precompiled binaries: type ./dct -h and ./shuffle -h. Both commands should produce as an output a short summary of command line options. If this works, copy all files into the directory ../bin.

If you cannot or do not want to use the precompiled binaries, compile the programs: Change into the mlee directory and type make all. This will compile the DCT and shuffle programsand place it into the subdirectory bin.

If you do not have the md5sum command already installed and working on your system, type make md5sum. This will compile the md5sum program and place it into the subdirectory bin. You have to change the setting for the $MD5BIN variable in the configuration file scripts/config.pm to indicate the complete path of the bin directory.

Finally you probably need to adapt METAL-MLEE to the learning algorithms you are using. Section 6 gives instructions how to do that.

METAL-MLEE is now ready for use. If you wish you can place the subdirectory script in the binary search path. You can then directly invoke the commands from there by simply entering the name provided the perl program is installed in /usr/local/bin. If perl is installed somewhere else you can either make a link in /usr/local/bin, or change the Perl-scripts so that the first line indicates the correct position, or simply invoke the scripts like this: perl <fullpathnameofscript>.

Source code by other authors included in the package

Nearly all of the programs included in the METAL-MLEE package has been written by the author of this document. However the following code by other authors is included:

• The check_database.pl script has originally been written by Carlos Soares.
• The shuffle program uses a C++ wrapper to the C-code of the Mersenne Twister pseudo random number generator, written by Takuji Nishimura. The original C-code for PRNG is licensed under the GPL.
• the Source code for the md5sum program included in the src directory is copyrighted to RSA Data Security, 1991-1992. See the comment in the file md5c.c for details.