One of Roger’s main interests is compilation as applied to code, SMARTS patterns, and indeed anything else. Indeed, for a period back in the noughties, Roger moonlighted as a middle-end maintainer for the GCC project.
So when, during a sabbatical, he was faced with the task of compiling Gaussian, he naturally turned to GFortran. However, given that this would not compile it, he tweaked the compiler and submitted patches to the FSF (see for example, the MOPAC changes on page 43 of this summary). When not all of these patches were accepted into mainline GFortran, he packaged the remaining pieces into a Fortran pre-processor that emulates the (non-standard) behaviour of commercial compilers.
The result, gXXfortran, is now available on GitHub. In theory, it should work for a standard Linux or Mac system. However, as we don’t have access to the Gaussian source code, your mileage may vary.
This package provides a “pgf77” script that emulates the Portland Group’s PGI fortran 77 compiler, instead using the Free Software Foundation’s GNU gfortran compiler instead. This emulation is sufficient to allow packages such as Gaussian03, that would otherwise require a commercial compiler, to be built using open source tools.
In addition, this package also allows Gaussian03 to be built on a case-insensitive file system (such as when using Mac OS X, cygwin or a FAT32 drive) by overriding the behaviour of “cp” and “gau-cpp” such that they don’t cause problems when used by Gaussian’s build scripts on non case-sensitive file systems.