[MINC-users] Official Installation Instructions

[Mishkin Derakhshan]

Hi,

So I needed to install minc on a fresh ubuntu 12.04 32-bit machine at
home and I thought I would approach the issue as any other potential
minc user would by googling "minc".

There are a few hits that look right, but going with this is the first
sensible one:

http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/MINC/
which has some links to debian packages, but sadly, not the one I am
looking for. I also see links to packages.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/tgz/ to
download some tarballs. Maybe that is what I should do?

If (by chance) I click on the menus on the left I can stumble upon this:
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/ServicesSoftwareMincToolKit

This also looks promising, but again I don't see the exact version I'm
looking for, and 32-bit support sounds iffy. I remember seeing a bunch
of other links on the previous webpage (and google) so I check out:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MINC
which has some nice details about what is supported and gives me two more links.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MINC/Tutorials/BinaryInstalls
which for me is no good because it only goes up to ubuntu 10.10 and in
64 bit, so I look at this:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MINC/Tutorials/SourceInstall
which again has some nicely detailed instructions, and it looks like
this is what I want:
https://github.com/vfonov/EZminc/raw/master/build_quarantine/Makefile

I've used this in the past, and it has worked so I am inclined to just
use it. BUT, I remember this google hit for MINC:
https://github.com/BIC-MNI/

And I think to myself, well maybe I should use the EZminc from BIC-MNI
instead of vfonov. Seems more official.
Looking on that website though, it seems that what I really want is
this (there was a link to it on this page too
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/ServicesSoftwareMincToolKit)

https://github.com/BIC-MNI/minc-toolkit

The README displayed at the bottom of the page looks great, though it
lists dependencies for only 11.10, and there is a bad link (I'm
guessing, this should be BIC-MNI instead of vfonov):
git clone git://github.com/vfonov/minc-toolkit.git minc-toolkit

I know that many of these pages exist to satisfy the wide range of
systems that we are trying to support, but it would be useful to have
a "blessed" set of instructions. For example, if you google FSL or
Freesurfer, within 1 or 2 very easily guided clicks you know what to
do.

My suggestion, is to keep one of the pages (wikibooks, github, BIC
webpage) up to date, and have the other ones all have big bold links
that tell you to go to the "official" installation instructions page.

Sorry for the long rant,

mishkin