With some help, I was finally able to build and run the Athena hello world example in release 2.1.1 at CERN. I was successful using egcs. The gcc build failed because a shared library was missing. Apparently there are problems with the gcc build of (the not yet frozen) build 2.1.1.
I used the 11sep01 CMT guide from Philippe Ghez as a starting point. He gives instructions for building a single package, building a collection of packages and running without building.
The instructions for building a single package didn't work because athena is not defined and athena and other library links are not installed in the appropriate subdirectory of the package area. This does not appear to be a useful mode for producing and running executables. Better to use the multiple package build discussed below.
The instructions to run without building make use of the TestRelease package. These did finally work once I made a couple obvious corrections (which I passed to Philippe) and added a few things. With some help, I learned to add Control and Generators to the TestRelease requirements. Apparently the athena example includes the requirements for compiling and linking but not those needed to run with the provided jobOptions file. Arguably this is the right thing to do but it does put some burden on the user to discover this second set of dependencies.
I also learned how to copy the appropriate jobOptions files to the run directory:
cp $ATHEXHELLOWORLDROOT/share/jobOptions.* . cp $ATHENACOMMONROOT/share/* .When all this was done, the command "athena" ran properly.
As a check I went back to release 2.1.0 and verified that I get the same results both at CERN and BNL.