Difference between revisions of "Installing"

Revision as of 17:07, 16 April 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).

Precomiled 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. To download the latest source into a directory called 'comet' type:

git clone git://www.dayel.com/comet.git

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, I found this YouTube video a useful place to start.

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. If these 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. Follow these instructions to install universal VTK libraries under OS X (macports now has a 'vtk5' package that will compile the libraries---I haven't tested it with these yet). I will also upload instructions on how to make OS X universal libraries GSL soon.

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).

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.