Samtools installation using Cygwin

[Karina Martins]

I'm trying to install samtools 1.1 under Cygwin but I got the following error message. Did anyone have the same error?

$ make
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_CURSES_LIB=1 -I. -Ihtslib-1.1 -c -o bam_index.o bam_index.c
Assembler messages:
Fatal error: can't create bam_index.o: Permission denied
Makefile:116: recipe for target 'bam_index.o' failed
make: *** [bam_index.o] Error 1


I'm using Windows 8, 64-bit, and Cygwin 1.7.34.

[ronton]

You may want to make a partition and dual boot Linux to save the hassle, unless you only need to perform a small set of specific operations.

Forgive me if you are more experienced with programming, this may be exactly what you want. For a novice bioinformatician like me it seems as though navigating the data and learning how to use the tools and/or fix bugs is challenging as is. I am not sure if going through Cygwin will help with that.

[ronton]

Some people may just use PuTTY or ssh to do data analysis on a remote machine/computing cluster.

[Karina Martins]

Thank you for your fast answer. I'm definitely not experienced in programming. I wonder how I could solve this error without dual booting my PC.

[cmbetts]

I was able to compile samtools 0.1.19 a few months ago on windows 8.1 using MinGW to do the compilation (I don't remember what additional work it took to get going, but I seem to remember turning to MinGW when cygwin failed). That was on a work computer I didn't have the option of dual booting.
That being said, it's a sad, lonely road trying to run any of the standard NGS tools on windows. If samtools is the only program you need, fighting windows might be worth it, but if you're planning on using any additional tools, take the pain of setting up a dual boot. Almost all of the tools are written for Linux first, and are generally easy to install and run, whereas on Windows, you often need to compile them yourself (if they even compile on Windows) and it can be really hard to find support (I've had cases recently where author supplied Windows binaries don't even start. That's about the level of thought and support put into making them Windows compatible).

[Brian Bushnell]

You can run Picard in Windows, which has most or all of the features of samtools. I prefer samtools, though. Long term, if you plan to do lots of different things with various programs, I would also recommend a dual-boot setup... it will make things a lot simpler.

[sarvidsson]

The specific error you get seems to be saying that you are missing write permissions in the directory you are trying to compile samtools. Anyway, I have the same opinion as the others here - trying to get high-throughput bioinformatics software packages to run under Windows is more trouble than learning to use Linux.

If you have enough memory (4 GB would be possible, but 8+ GB better), I'd recommend you to install a virtual machine (e.g. VirtualBox) with Ubuntu (or possibly BioLinux) instead of setting up a dual boot system - saves you the reboots and even makes a bit of integration possible: I do it the other way around - Windows VM guest on a Linux host, and have it set up to open certain Microsoft office files with software within my Windows virtual machine. Getting Windows 8 to dual boot is a hassle, as well.

[Karina Martins]

Thank you everyone who replied. I really appreciated knowing I have some options.
My computer is only 4 GB and unfortunately dual booting is not a option for me.
I'll try Picard first. And then MinGW.
As sarvidsson said I'm "missing write permissions in the directory", I moved samtools to another directory and installation went further. But, at the end I had a different error message.

gcc: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-pthread’
Makefile:126: recipe for target 'samtools' failed
make: *** [samtools] Error 1

It seems to be an endless adventure installing samtools under Cygwin. So, I'm giving up.

[Richard Finney]

I just downloaded samtools 1.2 source (as bzipped tarball), decompressed and untarred

Then .. 2 things ....

#1 Change line by adding the exp and log defines ...
CPPFLAGS = $(DFLAGS) $(INCLUDES)
to
CPPFLAGS = $(DFLAGS) $(INCLUDES) -Dexpl=exp -Dlogl=log

#2 Change all instances of "-pthread" to "-lpthread"

Result ; It Works (at least it compiles and produces and EXE) ...

finneyr@NCI-01874532 /cygdrive/c/rich/samtools-1.2
$ ./samtools.exe

Program: samtools (Tools for alignments in the SAM format)
Version: 1.2 (using htslib 1.2.1)

Usage: samtools <command> [options]

Commands:
-- indexing
faidx index/extract FASTA
index index alignment
-- editing
calmd recalculate MD/NM tags and '=' bases
fixmate fix mate information
reheader replace BAM header
rmdup remove PCR duplicates
targetcut cut fosmid regions (for fosmid pool only)
-- file operations
bamshuf shuffle and group alignments by name
cat concatenate BAMs
merge merge sorted alignments
mpileup multi-way pileup
sort sort alignment file
split splits a file by read group
bam2fq converts a BAM to a FASTQ
-- stats
bedcov read depth per BED region
depth compute the depth
flagstat simple stats
idxstats BAM index stats
phase phase heterozygotes
stats generate stats (former bamcheck)
-- viewing
flags explain BAM flags
tview text alignment viewer
view SAM<->BAM<->CRAM conversion


______




Compiling under Visual C is another story; I've done by hacking the code on earlier samtools.

[Karina Martins]

Hi Richard Finney,
Thank you for your help! I downloaded samtools-1.2 as you recommended. It’s written in my original Makefile:
CC = gcc
CPPFLAGS = $(DFLAGS) $(INCLUDES)
CFLAGS = -g -Wall -O2
LDFLAGS =
LDLIBS =
DFLAGS= -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_CURSES_LIB=1

So, I changed CPPFLAGS to:
CPPFLAGS = -Dexpl=exp -Dlogl=log
But, when I changed "-pthread" to "-lpthread" I had an error message:

$ make
Makefile:126: *** separator missing. Stop.

[Richard Finney]

I made a mistake; I miscopied and didn't proofread.

See edit in previous post ... previous post is now edited.

CPPFLAGS = $(DFLAGS) $(INCLUDES)

should be

CPPFLAGS = $(DFLAGS) $(INCLUDES) -Dexpl=exp -Dlogl=log


Note added "-Dexpl=exp -Dlogl=log"

[Karina Martins]

Thank you, Richard
I tried, but it's still not working. Now, I'm having a bunch of other errors.
The first one is:

bedidx.o: In function `bed_read':
/cygdrive/c/samtools-1.2/bedidx.c:170: undefined reference to `gzopen'
/cygdrive/c/samtools-1.2/bedidx.c:170.text+0xec4): relocation truncated to fit: R_X86_64_PC32 against undefined symbol `gzopen'

It's followed by dozens of other 'undefined reference to'
I searched similar errors in the web, but couldn't fix those errors.

[GenoMax]

Try the solution here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...-to-gzopen-etc

Edit the makefile.

[Karina Martins]

All -lz comes after the lists of objects in my Makefile...