The build uses autoconf (so autools are required) to determine what features will be available by your system. You must have the development libraries installed for all the file backends you want support for (see above). If you intend to build more than the C language bindings, you need to have the respective build support in a place where autoconf will pick them up (i.e. python development files, a Java Development Kit, etc.).

For more information see the README in the toplevel of the source distribution. In case you need help, feel free to contact the developers using the nexus-developers mailing list.

Download the appropriate gzipped tar file, unpack it, and run the standard configure procedure from the resulting nexus directory. For example, for version 4.2.1;

$ tar zxvf nexus-4.2.1.tar.gz

$ cd nexus-4.2.1

$ ./configure

To find out how to customize the installation, e.g., to choose different installation directories, type

$ ./configure --help

Carefully check the final output of the configure run. Make sure all features requested are actually enabled.

$ make

$ make install

See the README file for further instructions.

HDF4 is not supported under CYGWIN - both HDF5 and MXML are supported and can be downloaded and built as usual. When configuring HDF5 you should explicitly pass a prefix to the configure script to make sure the libraries are installed in a "usual" location i.e.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/hdf5

Otherwise you will have to use the --with-hdf5=/path/to/hdf5 option later when configuring NeXus to tell it where to look for hdf5. After building hdf5, configure and build NeXus using the instructions for source code distribution above.