GAMESS Installation Instructions for Linux

Visit the GAMESS homepage and request a copy of the "64 bit (x86_64 compatible) under Linux with gnu compilers" source code
Download the source code file, gamess-current.tar.gz, using the username "source" and the password in the email message that you received
Make sure you have csh and gfortran and patch installed

$ sudo yum install csh gcc-gfortran (for CentOS and Amazon Linux)
$ sudo yum -y install patch (for CentOS and Amazon Linux)
$ sudo apt-get install csh gfortran (for Debian, Ubuntu)
$ sudo apt-get -y install patch (for Debian, Ubuntu)
Uncompress the archive; change ownership to root and remove setgid bit

$ su
# cd /usr/local
# tar xzf /{download_dir}/gamess-current.tar.gz
# chown -R root:root gamess
# chmod -R g-s gamess
Configure the installation

# cd gamess
# ./config
- Follow the on screen prompts
- Set the machine type to linux64
- Leave the gamess installation directory as the default
- Leave the gamess build location as the default
- Leave the gamess version number as 00
- Enter "gfortran" for your choice of FORTRAN
- Follow the onscreen instructions to obtain the gfortran version
- If you don't have math libraries installed, enter none
- Use sockets rather than MPI
- No to MSU function
- Opt out of using LIBCCHEM
Compile ddi
# cd ddi
# ./compddi >& compddi.log
# mv ddikick.x ..
# cd ..
Compile gamess (takes ~20 minutes)
# ./compall >& compall.log
Link gamess
# ./lked gamess 00 >& lked.log
Update the rungms script
# vi rungms
Edit the following lines to read as follows

set SCR=/tmp
set USERSCR=/tmp
set GMSPATH=/usr/local/gamess
Check all compilation and linking log files
# grep "cannot stat" compall.log
# tail -n 20 ddi/compddi.log
# more lked.log
# exit

$ cd ~
$ mkdir gamess
$ cp -p /usr/local/gamess/tests/standard/exam01.inp ~/gamess
$ cd ~/gamess
$ /usr/local/gamess/rungms exam01 > exam01.log

If errors occur while testing, delete all scratch and result files to permit further tests
$ rm -f /tmp/exam01*
$ rm -f ~/gamess/exam01.log

Login to WebMO as user 'admin'
Click 'Interface Manager' to enable the interfaces to any computational chemistry packages that you have installed on your system
Click the 'Enable' button for GAMESS
Click 'Edit' to configure the Gamess interface
Verify that the entries are correct; if necessary, edit entries and click Submit
- Gamess Version: YYYY
- Gamess directory: /usr/local/gamess
- Gamess binary (name, not path): gamess.00.x
- Ddikick binary (name, not path): ddikick.x
Click 'Return to Admin', followed by 'Logout' to exit the WebMO administration page

Login as a WebMO user, and run a test job using GAMESS as the computational engine
Workarounds:
ddikick requires significant amounts of shared memory. If your output file contains the error message:
DDI Process 0: error code 911
ddikick.x: application process 0 quit unexpectedly.
ddikick.x: Fatal error detected.
The error is most likely to be in the application, so check for input errors, disk space, memory needs, application bugs, etc.
ddikick.x will now clean up all processes, and exit...
you can try increasing your shared memory. First display the amount of shared memory available (in bytes):
# cat /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
Then try increasing it to 4GB:
# echo 4294967296 > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
# echo "kernel.shmmax=4294967296" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
or try increasing it to 16GB:
# echo 17179869184 > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
# echo "kernel.shmmax=17179869184" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

This guide has been tested on CentOS 6 and 7, Debian 8, and Ubuntu 14.

To use the 2014 release of gamess on gfortran compilers newer than version 4.9 (as is the case for Ubuntu 16) it is necessary to modify case statements in gamess/config and gamess/comp to include your gfortran version.