The polymake distributions and accompanying software are just normal RPM packages you are surely acquainted with. Use rpm -i to install them for the first time, rpm -U to upgrade to the newer release, and so on.

The packages are relocatable, you can install them at a different location than /usr/local/polymake if you add the --prefix option to the rpm command.

The Makefile for client development is marked as configuration file. You can there set, for instance, the preferable compiler flags.

When you upgrade to the next polymake release later, your changes aren't lost. The configuration files you have ever edited are saved beside the upgraded ones with .rpmsave suffix appended. After an upgrade you should compare these files and merge your individual changes into the new version.

## Notes

1. The most important prerequisite package for polymake installation, the GMP (GNU Multi Precision) library, is shipped with RedHat and some other Linux distributions in a non-optimized form only (that is, compiled for a generic 386 CPU.) If you are dealing with really large polytopes, or having especially long coordinates, you might consider to upgrade it by a version optimized for your hardware.
   From our download page you can obtain GMP packages built for Pentium 4 and Athlon CPUs. Yet better, you compile GMP yourself. It has a highly elaborated auto-configuration mechanism you hardly ever need to intervene in.
   Since the polymake client programs are linked against the shared GMP library, you will benefit from the improved performance as soon as you install one of these fine-tuned packages.
2. The `polymake` packages for Pentium 4 and Athlon CPUs are compiled with gcc 3.4 which is still not included as a standard compiler in the most popular Linux distributions. Therefore the packages contain a copy of the C++ runtime system shared libraries. If you already have installed gcc 3.4 on your site, you should better discard this copy during the package installation, as it would surely match your system not that good as your gcc. Just use the option --excludepath in the rpm command:

       rpm --excludepath /usr/local/polymake/lib/c++ polymake-*.rpm