FOX Wiki
Compiling Fox on Linux
Compiling F.O.X. under Linux is normally easy (it is developped using Mandriva Linux). The source code for Fox now includes the wxWidgets and freeglut libraries, so dependencies should be minimal. As always, send me an email at vincefn@users.sf.net if you have any trouble with the installation.
Steps:
Installing the required graphics libraries
Below are specific instructions to install the required graphics libaries for the following distributions :
Please add or correct the instructions for your distribution...
If your distribution is not listed, just follow the general building instructions.
General Instructions (if your distribution is not listed below)
To install F.O.X. under Linux:
You will need valid libraries and development files for OpenGL. You may require a specific library for your card (NVidia,...), the Xfree-devel or libxorg-devel, and the gtk-devel (or gtk+-devel or gtk2-devel...) packages. For all major distributions, these packages are included either in the default install or as an additionnal package.
Mandrake & Mandriva
Mandriva 10.2 (2006)
The required packages (just urpmi followed by tha package names - you need the main and contrib rpm repositories) are :
Development packages: gcc gcc-c++ gcc-cpp gfortran
Graphics development packages : libxorg-x11-devel, libgtk+1.2-devel, libMesaglut3-devel
Fedora
This is partially a guess since I do not have this distribution, so feel free to correct these
Fedora Core 3 & 4
Development packages: gcc gcc-c++ gcc-g77
Graphics development package : xorg-x11-devel, gtk+-devel
Ubuntu
(Ubuntu 7.10)
Development packages: gcc g++ gcc-g77
Graphics development package : libgl1-mesa-dev, libglu1-mesa-dev, libgtk2.0-dev
SuSE
This is partially a guess since I do not have this distribution, so feel free to correct these
SuSE 9.3
Development packages: gcc gcc-c++ gcc-g77
Graphics development package : xorg-x11-devel, gtk-devel (or gtk2-devel)
Get, compile & install Fox
Get the Fox.tar.bz2 from SourceForge, CCP14(UK), CCP14(Canada) or CCP14(USA)
Then compile and install Fox (replace VERSION by your version of Fox):
tar -xjf Fox-VERSION.tar.bz2 cd Fox-VERSION cd Fox make # See note below about unicode and shared libraries options make install #(for this last step you must be root).
Note: there are several options for the make command:
It is possible to build a unicode version of Fox by using "make unicode=1". This is becoming the default for most linux distributions, so is recommended now.
If fftw, wxgtk, freeglut or newmat are already available as shared libraries on your computer, you can use them without recompiling them. You can just append "shared-wxgtk=1", "shared-glut=1", "shared-fftw=1" and , "shared-newmat=1". If you have all four shared libraries (as possible for Debian and Ubuntu), just use "shared=1". Examples:
make shared-wxgtk=1 shared-glut=1 shared-fftw=1 unicode=1
Fox will be installed in /usr/local/bin/Fox. Otherwise the compiled file is in the src/Fox subdirectory.
Note: if during the early stages of the compilation (when freeglut is compiled), you get an error message about libGL.la, this can mean that libGL.la is not in the same directory as other x11 libraries. On my computer, where libGL.la is provided by the nVidia installer, I needed to do "ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.la /usr/X11R6/lib/".
Compiling a version of Fox without GUI (Fox-nogui)
It is possible to compile a version of Fox that does not use a GUI and can only be used from the command-line. This is useful if you want to use Fox on a cluster. To do that just you just need to compile the Fox-nogui target:
tar -xjf Fox-VERSION.tar.bz2 cd Fox-VERSION cd Fox make Fox-nogui
The resulting application is src/Fox-nogui.
Note that when switching from building Fox to building Fox-nogui (and vice-versa) you must do a make clean first.
Compiling an optimized version of Fox
Compile options
The first set of optimizations can be activated by using processor-specific optimizations. If you edit the Fox/ObjCryst/rules.mak file, and search for the part where the CPPFLAGS are defined:
CPPFLAGS = -O3 -w -ffast-math -fstrict-aliasing -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops
Auto-vectorization: starting with gcc 4.0.0, it is possible to automatically vectorize some loops: append -ftree-vectorize to the CPPFLAGS options to do that (see the examples commented out in the rules.mak file).
Profile driven optimizations
Fox can be further optimized by making "test runs" which are used to give hints to the compiler on how to best optimize the code. To do this you (i) compile Fox by enabling the "recording" of the optimization, then (ii) you run a few optimizations, then (iii) you recompile using the recorded profile. This requires gcc version 3.2 or above.To do that from the Fox subdirectory, do:
make clean make Fox profile=2 src/Fox --nogui example/pbso4-joint.xml --randomize -n 50000 -o /dev/null src/Fox --nogui example/Cimetidine-powder.xml --randomize -n 50000 -o /dev/null src/Fox --speedtest make clean make Fox profile=3 make install
This yields about 10% faster code.