News: From November 2007 I am no longer regularly maintaining the mwrank distribution as a separate package. If you want to run mwrank, it is recommended that you install Sage. Otherwise see here for the latest version of mwrank available as a separate package.
Depending on what you're doing, if you would like to use mwrank in OS X, Linux, or Microsoft Windows, downloading Sage is another alternative. As of sage-1.4, Sage includes the mwrank build and builds of all the extra programs, e.g., tmrank, findinf, etc., so they are available from sage by typing at a command-line prompt, e.g.,
sage -mwrank (+options as needed)
Sage,
builds the component programs of
mwrank against a shared version of the mwrank, NTL, and PARI
libraries, so the binaries are smaller and should load more quickly (if
loaded repeatedly). Also,
Sage is designed
to be easy to build from source on a wide range of platforms,
so if you're having problems building mwrank because of missing
dependencies, try building
Sage
which includes all dependencies, e.g., NTL, PARI, etc.
On Linux getting shared versions of the above-mentioned libraries wasn't too hard; under OS X it was pretty tricky. Also, on Intel OS X, as of October 2006, Sage is still the only system that ships a version of MPIR (and hence PARI) that is compiled with assembly language optimization, so it's often 3 times faster at big integer arithmetic. So, especially for OS X, you might get a better environment in which to run the mwrank programs by getting Sage. There is also the advantage that one can access the elliptic curve database and mwrank both from a single interpreter interface.