Hi Dan -

There are only three reasons to rebuild CMTK:

• The pre-built binaries are for a more recent CPU generation than what you have, resulting in crashes.
• The pre-built binaries are built for a CPU that doesn't support all the fancy features of your CPUs, and you expect a serious performance gain from optimizing for your specific machines.
• The pre-built binaries depend on a shared system library that is not available on your systems, or is available only as a different, non-compatible version.

I seriously doubt that you'd run into 1., since I build the releases for fairly vanilla CPU configs. Regarding 2., any performance gains would likely be very small, on the order of single-digit percentages, and you'd also need to have a compiler that actually can take advantage of whatever new CPU features there are.

As for 3. - you may be okay just installing a missing library dependency. If you do have incompatible shared libraries, or if the missing library just isn't available on your system, then indeed you'd have to rebuild the binaries.

But if you do rebuild, you will need CMake. It's the only config/build system that CMTK supports. Why would that be a problem though? It seems CMake is available on pretty much every platform you could wish for.

Best,
  Torsten