I want to install a software called MUMmer(http://mummer.sourceforge.net/manual/) on my Ubuntu 18.04 machine.
The manual says that it requires some third party software to run successfully. I understand that these need to be installed separately. But I am not quite sure what "utilities must be accessible via the system path" means. Does it have something to do with path setting? How should it be done?
I am new to Linux. Any help is appreciated.
The program requires some external utilities, including make, perl, sh, csh, g++, sed, awk and ar, and for displaying graphs fig2dev, gnuplot and xfig.
These are all trusted and rather standard tools. Several of these are installed in a default Ubuntu installation. Others may be easily installed using the package manager.
Ubuntu is actually quite user friendly about when a program is missing. When a command is not installed, Ubuntu will tell you the package you need to install for making the command available. For example, if you try to run xfig on a system where it is not yet installed, then
$ xfig
Command 'xfig' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install xfig
telling you the command (the last line) that allows to install the tool.
"utilities must be accessible via the system path" means that you should be able to execute a utility just by typing the name of the executable. This will work only if the executable is present in one of the path that the system searches for executables.
A path on Ubuntu may look like:
$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/games
As you type xfig, the system will first search /usr/local/sbin to see whether an executable file (executable bit is set) with the name xfig exists there. If not, it will continue the search in /usr/local/bin and so forth. If the executable is not found in any of these directories, the message reproduced above is displayed.
For practical purposes, any tools you install will be installed in /usr/bin (system tools go to /usr/sbin), and so will be accessible automatically in your PATH. If one day, you encounter an executable that is installed elsewhere, the easiest way to make it accessible in your PATH is to create a symbolic link to it in /usr/local/bin, but that is not going to happen with the rather standard/classical tools your program needs.
make check. Could you post its output? This is necessary to identify the needs.make checkand gotmake: *** No rule to make target 'check'. Stop.