Building on Ubuntu 11.10

These are the steps I needed to take before building VisIt on Ubuntu 11.10 with the default (gcc 4.6) compiler.

On my system this runs with hardware accelerated OpenGL. I used the NVIDIA 290.10 driver; note you need to blacklist the nouveau driver to get the NVIDIA driver to install properly. I did need to install the mesa-utils package, but this does not replace any of the hardware acceleration; it's only for some of the extra OpenGL-related support libraries.

To build visit and the support libraries, I installed these packages (and any dependencies they required):

  • g++
  • mesa-utils
  • subversion
  • libqt4-dev
  • qt4-dev-tools
  • qt4-doc
  • autoconf
  • libxt-dev
  • bison
  • flex
  • libxrender-dev
  • libxi-dev

I also installed these, though none of them strictly to get visit to build, so I doubt you need any of them (though some sort of MPI is necessary if you want to build a parallel version of VisIt, of course):

  • xemacs21
  • openmpi-bin
  • libboost-all-dev
  • tkdiff

build_visit

You can run build_visit to compile 3rd party libraries and ultimately build VisIt. While the default mode is graphical, there is a --console mode that can build it all from the command line. A set of commands to build the code looks something like this: 

cd
mkdir visit
cd visit
wget http://portal.nersc.gov/svn/visit/trunk/releases/2.5.2/build_visit2_5_2
chmod 700 build_visit2_5_2
mkdir thirdparty_shared
./build_visit2_5_2 --console --thirdparty-path `pwd`/thirdparty_shared
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