I am runing
ifc version 7.x and
ifort version 8.0 on my desktop and laptop under Mandrake Linux. I haven't seen such problems. The new structure of ROMS/TOMS requires a library so we can couple to other systems. Notice that the new driver of ROMS/TOMS follows the Earth System Modeling Framework (
ESMF) conventions. Libraries are also required for the tangent linear and adjoint models. I think that the problem that you are having is associated with your Linux environment. The Unix
ar tool is used to create, modify, and extract object files from libraries. Various Unix environments require different commands and/or flags. Perhaps, the flags in the Makefile that you are using are not appropriate for Redhat Linux. Try
man ar and check if this is the case with Redhat Linux.
Rob Hetland told me last week that he was able to run version 2.1 on his PC cluster. He is now using LAM/MPI for his distributed-memory applications. This new MPI library is more efficient than MPICH. I highly recommend to install this efficient library. See
http://www.lam-mpi.org for more details.
Good luck, H