Installation Requirements for Priism 4 on x86 Linux

The x86 Linux version of Priism includes files for 32-bit and 64 bit (x86_64) systems. The 32-bit files are usable on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems provided that 32-bit versions of the required libraries are available. The 64-bit files are only usable on 64-bit systems and need 64-bit versions of the required libraries.

Operating system

For the 32-bit version, you need a version of Linux installed that supports ELF binaries and has the glibc 2.1 or later versions of the system libraries installed. For the 64-bit version, you need a version of Linux installed that has the glibc 2.3 or later versions of the system libraries installed. On either 32- or 64-bit systems, Priism makes use of libc.so.6, libdl.so.2, libm.so.6, librt.so.1, and libpthread.so.0. On 64-bit systems, Priism also makes use of libgcc_1.so.1 and libstdc++.so.6.

Required libraries and additional software

X

It is necessary to have the X libraries installed and in the library search path (libXt.so.6, libXi.so.6, libXext.so.6, and libX11.so.6 are used). To use the components that have graphical user interfaces, it is necessary to have an X server and window manager running. Priism 4 has been used with XFree86 3.36, XFree86 4, and Xi Graphics X server. In many cases, the X server will only support true color visuals or pseudocolor visuals but not both, and typically only one hardware color map is available for pseudocolor visuals. Because of those limitations, it is often best to configure your X server to use 24 or 32 bit color; 16 bit color is also feasible but that severely restricts the number of distinct colors available for greyscale images. The command-line application, xdpyinfo, will print out the current capabilities of the X server: look for the list of visuals at the end of the output and the "number of colormaps" line which, hints at the number of hardware colormaps available. The window manager should be ICCCM compliant (namely it should cooperate and install the colormap for the window with input focus), and if it is compatible with mwm, then certain minor features in Priism that modify the window manager decorations will work correctly.

OpenGL/Mesa

To use the components with graphical interfaces, it is necessary to have the OpenGL library, libGL.so.1, (or their Mesa equivalents) installed and in the library search path. The versions of libGL.so.1 shipped with RedHat 6.2 and Suse 8.2 do not work; no problems have been reported with other versions.

Motif/LessTif

The graphical interfaces depend on the Motif toolkit (or LessTif's replacement for it) and expect that library to be in the library search path. There are three versions of Priism for Linux. One is compatible with the LessTif library and expects libXm.so.2 to be in the library search path. Another is compatible with 2.2.* versions of Open Motif, which is the version of Open Motif that many Linux distributions use, and expects libXm.so.3 to be in the library search path. The third is compatible with 2.1.* versions of Open Motif which use libXm.so.2 instead of libXm.so.3. It is likely that your Linux distribution has a prepackaged library that is compatible with one of the three versions. If you can not get a prepackaged library, installing LessTif is easier: it is available in source and binary form from http://www.lesstif.org.

Optional libraries and additional software

libtiff

Some components (Mrc2tiff, Tiff2mrc, and the TIFF plugin for ImageCapture and 3D Model) expect libtiff.so.3 to be in the library search path. Your Linux distribution likely includes a package for libtiff; the source is available from www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/.

Matlab

Priism includes the ImgToMat and MatToImg tools to convert Priism image files to and from Matlab's .mat files. To use those converters, you have to have Matlab 6.5 or 7 installed (for the 64-bit version you need Matlab 7).

Optional Hardware

If you have a Volume Pro 1000 board installed and the driver library (libvli3.so) is in the shared library path (it will be for a standard installation), Priism's Volume Viewer will use the Volume Pro 1000 for hardware accelerated volume rendering. Priism's Volume Viewer has been tested with versions 3.0 and 3.2 of the driver library.

Disk space

During installation, you need space for the downloaded archive and the uncompressed files; the uncompressed files do not need to be on the same disk as the downloaded archive. Once the software is installed, the downloaded archive may be deleted. The space required is 105 megabytes during installation and 75 megabytes afterwards.

While the software is running, it makes extensive use of a shared memory file and related temporary files. The amount of space needed for these files depends on the size of the data sets loaded, but a minimal configuration should have 200 megabytes of space available for these files and having approximately 500 megabytes of space available would be better. Step 5 of the installation procedure describes how the default location for the shared memory and temporary files is set in the sample setup scripts.

Related Priism Topics

Priism | Priism requirements for IRIX | Priism requirements for Mac OS X | Priism installation | Known problems | Recent changes | Priism download site

modified $Date: 2006/08/19 07:10:38 $