[Coin-ipopt] Re: AMPL interface for IPOPT Fortran Version (on Windows)

[Andreas Waechter]

Rajendra,

The COIN/Ipopt/doc/README.Windows document describes very briely how to
build the Ipopt AMPL executable under Windwos using Cygwin.  To make it
easier for you and hopefully other future users, let me try to describe
step by step what to do:

What you have to do is to install Cygwin from www.cygwin.com.  This is
pretty straight forward; you simply download the "setup" program and start
it.

Then you do the following steps (assuming here that you don't have any
compilcations with firewall settings etc - in that case you might have
to choose some connection settings differently):

- click next

- select "install from the internet" (default) and click next

- select a directory where Cygwin is to be installed (I left the default)
  and choose all other things to your liking, then click next

- select a temp dir for Cygwin setup to store some files (I left the
  default)

- select "direct connection" (default) and click next

- select some mirror site that seems close by to you and click next

- ok, now comes the complicated part:
  you need to select the packages that you want to have installed.  By
  default, there are already selections, but I think the compilers are
  usually not selected.  You need to make sure that you select the GNU
  compilers (for Fortran and C - together with the MinGW options), and the
  GNU Make.  For this, click on the "Devel" branch (which opens a subtree)
  and select:
   - gcc
   - gcc-core
   - gcc-g77
   - gcc-mingw
   - gcc-mingw-core
   - gcc-mingw-g77
   - make

  Then, in the "Web" branch, please select "wget" (which will make the
  installation of third party dependencies for Ipopt easier)

  This will automatically also select some other packages.  (I hope I
  didn't forget anything)

- Then you click on next, and Cygwin will be installed (follow the
  rest of the intructions and choose everything else to your liking).  At
  a later point you can easily add/remove packages with the setup program.

- Now that you have Cygwin, you can open a Cygwin window, which is like a
  UNIX shell window.  (I assume that you have some basic knowledge of
  UNIX/Linux...).

- Now you just follow the instructions of COIN/Ipopt/doc/QUICKINSTALL
  (i.e., you download the Ipopt tarball and put it into your Cygwin home
  directory - from the Windows explore that is for me at
  C:\Cygwin\home\andreasw )
  and you can unpack the package in your Cygwin home directory.  After
  that you obtain the third party code (like on Linux/UNIX), type
  './configure' and 'make install' in the right directories, and hopefully
  that will work.  The AMPL Ipopt executable will be in the directory
  COIN/Ipopt/bin (called 'ipopt').

- If that worked, please send me a note saying that it did work, so that I
  can include these descriptions in the documentation.  If it didn't work,
  I'm sure you sent a message back (to the mailing list) in any case...

One comment: I think the Ipopt AMPL executables generated this way will
not be able to tell you the CPIU time usage after a run.

It's a pitty that the installation under Windows is somewhat compilcated,
particularly for users that usually don't work with UNIX and compilers.
However, we can't distribute precompiled executables at this point,
because currently Ipopt depends on some Harwell subroutines, which we
cannot redistribute (they are free for academic purposes if you download
them yourself, but not free for commercial purposes, and one cannot give
them to someone else - unless of course you buy an appropriate commercial
license...)

Hope this helps,

Andreas



On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Rajendra, Venkata (IE10) wrote:

> Dear Andreas,
>
>
>
> I am facing difficulty in building the AMPL interface for IPOPT Fortran
> version on Windows Platform. Is there a document which, describes step by
> step procedure for the same. I looked into AMPL website but it does not
> describe any procedure for IPOPT solver.
>
>
>
>
>
> Thanks and Regards
>
> Rajendra
>
>