VTK for OVT page

On October 11, 2003 we have submitted the vtk 4.3.0 port for FreeBSD (ports/57858).
The port is available here.
To install port:

$ cd /usr/ports
$ sh /path/to/vtk-4.3.0-port.sh

This will create /usr/ports/graphics/vtk*.

$ cd graphics/vtk-java
$ make install -DWITH_TESTING

This will insall java bindings to vtk.

This page is created to assist people using OVT and VTK with Java support. I present notes from my personal experience with building VTK on different platforms. All the information will concern VTK releases 2.4 and 3.12.

Main links are

General tips

do not use precompiled binaries. Compile everything yourself.
use shared libs (.so) in user.make
always use only --with-shared flag to configure
use only --with-java flag to configure if you will not use TCL, etc.
use jikes a fast Java compiler from IBM to speedup build of java sources
chose a fast computer for build
remember about CLASSPATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH should contain libvtkJava.so & Co.
Here is a test.java I use to test VTK installation

FreeBSD i386

There is a VTK port under FreeBSD ports tree, but unfortunately it is not compiling with Java support. I used FreeBSD 4.1.1 RELEASE, jdk1.1.8 and TYA-1.7 JIT.

Main steps to sucess are:

compile static Mesa libs
fix configure
fix vtkJavaUtil.cxx (for VTK 2.4 only)
edit user.make
create vtkNNN.jar

Compile static Mesa libs

This is requrired to do because of thread problems with Mesa library. So, compile static Mesa libs with disabled thread support.

Fix configure

One should edit configure so it will generate THREAD_LIBS="-pthread"
to handle pthreads. Run
perl -pi -e 's|-lpthread|-pthread|g configure

Fix vtkJavaUtil

VTK 2.4 requres some changes to handle pthreads. This code is alredy included in VTK 3.x. One can use patch:

     static void vtk_release_mutex() {
         if (release_lock(&vtkGlobalMutex) < 0)
             perror("releasing mutex");
     }
     #define VTK_GET_MUTEX()  vtk_get_mutex()
     #define VTK_RELEASE_MUTEX() vtk_release_mutex()
     
     // Starts here ...
     
     #elif defined(__FreeBSD__) || defined(__linux__) || defined(sgi)
     #define USE_PTHREADS
     #ifdef USE_PTHREADS
     #include <pthread.h>
     pthread_mutex_t vtkGlobalMutex;
     #define VTK_GET_MUTEX()  pthread_mutex_lock(&vtkGlobalMutex)
     #define VTK_RELEASE_MUTEX() pthread_mutex_unlock(&vtkGlobalMutex)
     #endif
     
     // Ends here
     
     #else
     // for solaris
     #include 
     #include

Edit user.make

     MESA_INCLUDE=-I${X11BASE}/include
     MESA_LIB= /somwhere/libMesaGL.a /somwhere/libMesaGLU.a -lXt 

     # Add additional CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS for compilation
     # uncomment the following two lines to set your own flags
     USER_CFLAGS =  -O2 -D__NO_MATH_INLINES -D_THREAD_SAFE
     USER_CXXFLAGS = -O2 -D__NO_MATH_INLINES -D_THREAD_SAFE

     # if you want to try the java support you'll need to set the following
     # variables to match your environment and uncomment them
     #
     CLASSPATH=${CLASSPATH}:${VTK_OBJ}/java/
     JDKHOME=$(PREFIX)/jdk1.1.8
     JAVAC=$(LOCALBASE)/bin/jikes -classpath $(PREFIX)/jdk1.1.8/lib/classes.zip:${VTK_OBJ}/java
     # files .class will be placed here. To get access
     JAVA_CLASS_HOME=$(PREFIX)/vtk
     JAVAH=${JDKHOME}/bin/javah
     JAVA_INCLUDES=-I${JDKHOME}/include -I${JDKHOME}/include/freebsd
     JAVA_CXX_LIB=-L /usr/lib -thread -lstdc++ -lgcc

Create jar file

Check if all the *.slass files are in VTK_DIR/vtk. Then run jar cf vtk312.jar vtk

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Solaris

Solaris x86

We used Solaris 2.6, GCC 2.8 and Mesa. All compiled and worked fine.

Solaris Sparc

g++ 2.95.2 complains about NON ANSI things in /usr/openwin/include. Workaround is: change -I/usr/openwin/include to -isystem /usr/openwin/include

Here are the build instructions for Solaris 8 SPARC with WS C++ 5.0.

System: Ultra 60 / Elite 3D
Software: Sun OpenGL 1.2 for Solaris, JAVA2 (part of default Solaris installation), Sun Workshop Compilers 5.0
unpack distribution (approx. 300 Mb is needed):
```
gzcat vtk312Unix.tar.gz | tar xvf -
```
configure:
```
CC=cc CXX='CC -compat=4' ./configure --with-java --with-shared
```
-compat=4 thing is probaly not necessary. Probably one should patch WS or upgrade to new version ;-)

edit user.make:

JDKHOME=/usr/java1.2
JAVAC=/usr/bin/javac
JAVA_CLASS_HOME=/usr/local/vtk
JAVA_INCLUDES=-I${JDKHOME}/include -I${JDKHOME}/include/solaris
JAVA_CXX_LIB=-lC

temporary classpath:

export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/DASEDIR/vtk31/java

make it

final classpath

export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/loval/vtk

try compiling/running test.java

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Linux

There should be VTK RPMs available on the net, but if you have SEGMENTATION VIOLATION recompile everything yourself in way similar to FreeBSD

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