Difference between revisions of "Installing"

Revision as of 10:18, 7 November 2009

Installing the program

The program requires ImageMagick for writing images and bzip2 for compressing data files. We recommenced using macports to install ImageMagick on OS X, and cygwin to install ImageMagick and bzip2 on windows (see 'Platform Specific Information' below).

Precompiled binary for OS X

We provide a precompiled binary for Mac OS X, and instructions for compiling from source for OS X, Linux and Windows. The precompiled OS X binary includes the VTK 3D visualization and GSL random number generator, but still requires ImageMagick for the bitmap conversion.

Compiling from source

Downloading the source

The source is freely available via git under the open source GNU General Public License. You can download a zipped copy of the latest source here. You can browse the source repository at github or to create your own local git repository of the source in a directory called 'comet', install git then type:

git clone git://github.com/markdayel/comet.git

Compiling

Makefiles are included for building with GCC on linux, OS X, windows, and DEC Alpha, and an Xcode project file is also included for OS X. You can browse the source at http://www.dayel.com/git/comet.git . If you are unfamiliar with git, there is a lot if information online---I found this website a useful place to start.

VTK and GSL Dependencies

The code has two optional dependencies, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) which provides the Mersenne Twister random number generator (more statistically valid than the standard rand() function), and The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) which provides the 3D visualization routines. I have posted precompiled binary versions of the VTK and GSL libraries for OS X, which you should be able to use directly just by unzipping the files and setting the paths in Xcode or the makefile to point to the include files and libraries.

Compiling without GSL or VTK

If the libraries are not available, you can compile without them by changing the #define's USE_GSL_RANDOM and LINK_VTK in the file stdafx.h from 1 to 0 respectively.

Platform Specific Information

The code has been developed on OS X 10.5 and Linux, but should run fine in windows.

OS X

First install the Apple Developer Tools, then open the Xcode project file included in the source. Include the GSL and VTK libraries in the search path, or disable before compiling (see above).

Linux

A makefile is included for compilation with GNU Make. This should be edited to point to the GSL and VTK libraries, or disable them before compiling (see above). To install GSL on ubuntu type

sudo apt-get install libgsl0-dev

Windows

First install cygwin, then use cygwin to install ImageMagick, bzip2 and gcc, then compile as for Linux. If compiling with Visual Studio instead of gcc, you will also need a pthreads library.