OVT Installation under UNIX

Introduction
OVT-2 graphics is build on Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and Java. Thus, possibility to install OVT2 is depending mainly on support for VTK and Java on your system. VTK should run on major UNIX platforms. Availability of Java ports could be checked on http://java.sun.com/
General steps are
  1. Install Java (JDK)
  2. Install OpenGL or Mesa
  3. Install VTK with Java support
  4. Install OVT2
Steps 1-3 are described in the proper documentation.

Java notes
Software should work on both JDK 1.1 and 1.2. When using JDK 1.1 be sure to have SWING 1.1.1 (http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/) installed. Swing 1.1 has some bugs preventing software from working correctly. As far as Java part of OVT2 is distributed in the form of a jar file, you may probably have no need in using JDK and can use only JRE. We used only SUN's implementations of Java, but it should be no problem to use IBM's or other Java implementations.

OpenGL/Mesa notes
If you have OpenGL then you should use it, otherwise use Mesa (http://www.mesa3d.org/). Mesa works faster on Xfree86-4 because of GLX support. It is possible to run OVT to a remote X-display but depending on server/display configuration performance/stability could differ seriously. Please refer to platform specific tips for more details.

VTK notes
Good point to start looking is VTK Homepage (http://www.kitware.org/vtk.html).
Download VTK sources from VTK Homepage (http://www.kitware.org/vtk.html). Installing VTK with Java support is more complicated ;-) The most important moments are to modify thread support for some systems (FreeBSD, Linux) and to link VTK Java library with extra C++ libraries. If you will be using VTK only for OVT/Java then disable TCL and Python support because of timing. For details please refer to VTK documentation and our VTK page (http://ovt.irfu.se/vtk/)

OVT Installation
Setting OVT_HOME and JAVA_HOME
For the installation under UNIX you need to unpack ovt2g.tar.gz or ovt2g.tar.Z into installation directory (default is /usr/local). If directory is different from /usr/local, then you should modify OVT_HOME in ovt2g/bin/ovt. java should in the PATH or JAVA_HOME should be defined, otherwise you should set JAVA_HOME in ovt2g/bin/ovt.
Setting VTK
Be sure that VTK in your CLASSPATH and VTK libraries are in the linker path. If it is not so then set VTK_CLASSPATH to VTK classpath and VTK_LIBS to /path/to/vtk/lib in $OVT_HOME/bin/ovt.sh. On my workstation I do

VTK_CLASSPATH=/data/soft; (directory containing vtk.jar or dir vtk/ with files.class)
VTK_LIBS=/usr/local/lib; (directory containing libvtkJava.so)

Note: Be sure that VTK is installed correctly and really works! You should be able to run test:
vtk -test
You should see a blue sphere, if not then VTK is not working.
Compiling OVT2 libraries and binaries
Cd to $OVT_HOME/src and run configure script and run make SYSTEM (where SYSTEM is freebsd, solaris or linux) or modify the default Makefile. Run make all install
Note: In the future releases we will transfer all the C code into Java.
UNIX shared multiuser installation
To run program properly user should have write permissions to OVT configuration and data directories. To avoid interaction between users it is possible to make a personal installation. To do so run $OVT_HOME/bin/ovt.sh –install. It will copy all the necessary data to $HOME/ovt2g and then will use only personal data and configuration files.
Running OVT2
You can invoke OVT2 by running $OVT_HOME/bin/ovt.

Platform specific tips
For the moment we have seen OVT working on the following platforms:
FreeBSD
We used JDK1.1.8 (http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/) with TYA 1.7 JIT and Swing 1.1.1. JIT gives a good performance improvement. ShuJIT was crashing.
XFree86-4 seeds-up the graphics performance because of GLX rendering (you'll need a GLX module started in XF86Config)
To build VTK you'll need to make some patches. Please refer to our page on VTK (http://ovt.irfu.se/vtk/) for instruction.
Solaris x86
We used JDK 1.2 (http://java.sun.com/jdk/)
VTK compiled with GCC 2.8, Mesa 3.0
With this configuration it is possible to run OVT2 to a remote X-display, but performance is poor comparing to local display.
Solaris Sparc
We use SUN Ultra 60 with Elite 3D graphics and 512 Mb Ram. This is a good configuration is you want the software "to fly" ;-)
JDK 1.2.2 (http://java.sun.com/jdk/)
VTK compiled with SUN Workshop 5 C++ compiler (GCC failed to compile some Solaris X include files) and SUN's OpenGL. Be sure to install all patches to Workshop compilers and OpenGL. Solaris 7 option –sparcv9 for 64 bit libraries produced a crashing code. I have no explanation whether it should be so or it is because of some patches missing, etc.
Copyright © 2000, OVT Team. All rights reserved.


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