polymake can be used on UNIX systems only. It has been successfully tested on Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Linux, and MacOS 10.2. Other UNIX variants might do too, provided all necessary tools listed below are properly installed.
polymake does not run on any Windows system, even not in a Cygwin environment. We suppose the cause in some subtle differences in the implementation of inter-process communication means (pipes, sockets) which are essential for polymake; however, we could not track them down.
On the most UNIX systems, polymake can be compiled only with GNU gcc. Please pay attention to the compiler version: polymake 1.4 can be compiled with gcc 2.95.2 or 2.95.3 (but not with the inofficial snapshot 2.96 distributed by RedHat). polymake >= 1.5 can be compiled with every version of gcc 3 except the broken ones: 3.0.1 and 3.2.x (as per May 2003.)
If you are using Linux on an Intel-based PC, however, you can take the Intel C++ compiler instead. It is free for non-commercial use. Only the versions >= 7 will work. Don't get worried about numerous messages appearing during the compilation; they are all harmless.
Regarding other commercial compilers, those from Sun (Forte) and IBM are still not close enough to the ANSI C++, dont't even bother trying them.
The Comeau C++ compiler may be an attractive option in the future. The currently available version (4.3.0.1) cannot unfortunately be used due to an internal compiler error. It has been already reported to the Comeau Computing team, so that we hope for the soon improvement.
Significant parts of polymake are written in Perl; you will need it already in the configuration step. The most modern UNIX distributions contain perl out of the box, so this requirement should make you the least trouble. Every stable perl version from 5.6.0 upwards will do.
make
The installation procedures rely heavily on the advanced features of
GNU make utility; any other make will fail.
You will need the version 3.79 or newer. It is ported on almost every UNIX platform, and the installation
is quite simple and straightforward. Moreover, each Linux system configured for "Software Development"
contains it out of the box.
To compile polymake from the source code, you will need a rather powerful machine with at least 300 MB RAM: The C++ compilers are extraordinarily RAM-thirsty while compiling deeply nested templates, which polymake has a lot of.
The required resources for running polymake itself are moderate. It scales naturally with the complexity of your problems.