The polymake distributions and accompanying software are just normal RPM packages you are surely acquainted with. Use rpm -i to install them for the first time, rpm -U to upgrade to the newer release, and so on.

The packages are relocatable, you can install them at a different location than /usr/local/polymake if you add the --prefix option to the rpm command.

The Makefile for client development is marked as configuration file. You can store there, for instance, the preferable compiler flags.

When you upgrade to the next polymake release later, your changes aren't lost. The configuration files you have ever edited are saved beside the upgraded ones with .rpmsave suffix appended. After an upgrade you should compare these files and merge your individual changes into the new version.

## Notes

1. The most important prerequisite package for polymake installation, the GMP (GNU Multi Precision) library, is shipped with RedHat and some other Linux distributions in a non-optimized form only (that is, compiled for a generic 386 CPU.) If you are dealing with really large polytopes, or having especially long coordinates, you might consider to upgrade it by a version optimized for your hardware.
   From our download page you can obtain GMP packages built for Pentium 4 and Athlon CPUs. Yet better, you compile GMP yourself. It has a highly elaborated auto-configuration mechanism you hardly ever need to intervene in.
   Since the polymake client programs are linked against the shared GMP library, you will benefit from the improved performance as soon as you install one of these fine-tuned packages.
2. The subdivision in the end user's and developer's packages introduced in the earlier releases has been revoked. The latter has been always much smaller than the main package, and you will need the libraries at the latest with the upcoming polymake release 2.3. Now it's a good occassion to clean up with the package separation.
   Normally, the rpm utility should delete the old package polymake-devel automatically. If it does not happen for whatever reason, it will complain about many conflicting files and reject the package upgrade. In this case please delete it by hand: rpm -e polymake-devel and repeat the upgrade command.
3. The `polymake` packages are compiled with gcc 4.0.2 which is the standard compiler in SuSE Linux 10.0. If the rpm -i command on your system fails due to the unresolved dependence on the shared library libstdc++.so, you'll need to install gcc 4.0.2 or the later release as a third-party package (try RPMfind) or build it yourself from the official distribution downloaded from here or one of the numerous GNU mirror sites.
   In the latter case you should install `polymake` package with an option --nodeps, since rpm does not know anything about gcc you have built.
4. In the unfortunate case there are more unsatisfied dependences, especially on some glibc versioning symbols (which is a sign of your Linux distribution being too different from the ours), you will have to download the source RPM package and recompile it on your system. Provided you have all required development tools already installed, it can be accomplished with a single command:

       rpmbuild --rebuild polymake-VERSION.src.rpm

   After successful compilation you will get a ready-to-install binary package; the exact location will be told by rpmbuild at the very end of the long output.