Editing STIR-ASIM Howto (section)

===Software port===

XCAT is delivered as binary images acceptable to our (Surrey) systems. The XCAT release was the latest binary release for Linux. 

On contacting the main e-mail address on the web site for assistance with ASIM, I was given contact details for B.E. (Washington).

ASIM was developed for the MAC (gcc 4.0 and 4.2.1.) but I wanted to use it with LINUX (Ubuntu 10.04 with gcc 4.4.3). The build at Surrey was done by J.F. He encountered one problem with the build which required him to specify the inclusion of one math library which is included by default on the MAC version. 

We encountered two other problems with ASIM. One was a small bug in the command line parameter handling. This was apparent in the LINUX version only but was due to a difference in the memory allocation routines. MAC allocation fills allocated memory with nulls before return to the caller, Linux does not do this. The other was a bug-fix which was missing from the downloadable version. It is possible that all these problems will be fixed on the download site.

The STIR 2.1 installation was carried out by J.F. We have encountered no problems with the STIR software other than that the ASIM output, .yaff sonograms, was not accepted as an Ecat 7 formatted file. It is not clear whether ASIM or STIR or both require modification.