Installation of meshalyzer

Meshalyzer is regularly used on Linux and Mac machines, and runs under Windows as well.

Binary packages

We provide binary packages on the release page. Currently, it includes AppImage, which works on any recent enough Linux-based operating system and a .zip file with a Windows executable.

AppImage (Linux)

1. Download the .AppImage file of the latest version
2. Make it executable, for example, chmod +x Meshalyzer-3.2-x86_64.AppImage
3. Run it ./Meshalyzer-3.2-x86_64.AppImage

Windows

1. Download the .zip file of the latest version
2. Extract it into a folder
3. Run meshalyzer.exe. To access the files on your drive C:\, use the path /cygdrive/c in meshalyzer's file browser.

If you want to build meshalyzer yourself, please check the following sections.

Prerequisities

1. libpng

2. libjpeg

3. OpenMP is recommended to improve certain operations. For all compilers, except clang supplied by Apple, it is standard. A simple way to include it on Apple machines is with homebrew: brew install libomp

4. FLTK 1.3.x or higher.

5. freetype to render fonts.

6. glut or glfw for Linux and Windows only.

7. cmake version 3.12 or higher, if you want to make compiling easier.

8. To make the "windowless" rendering version, OSMesa

9. To read in VTK/VTU format meshes, install VTK development files

10. HDF5 if you want to optionally use HDF5 data containers

Using your package manager is recommended for installing these packages if possible. On macOS, homebrew works for us.

Compiling

Clone the repository and enter the codebase folder meshalyzer.

git clone https://git.opencarp.org/openCARP/meshalyzer.git
cd meshalyzer

We recommend to always use the latest release version as the master branch is continuously under development and might not be as robust as the releases: git describe --tags --abbrev=0 returns the latest release version (e.g. '2.2'). Then you can check out this version: git checkout 2.2.

We provide Makefiles and CMake files for compiling the code, choose the one that fits your workflow.

Makefile

1. Edit make.conf, to set the following:

   1. If VTK is installed, set the VTK_INC and VTK_DIR variables to point to the directories containing the VTK header files and libraries, respectively. Comment them out otherwise.

   2. If you have an Apple machine, make sure that HAVE_RETINA is correct.

   3. If rendering is really slow and you have an AMD graphics card, uncomment AMD_VIDEO.

   4. To use glfw instead of glut, set GLUT_ON to 0.

   5. If you want to use the HDF5 data format, uncomment HDF5=1

2. Type make -j

3. For the windowless version, type make mesalyzer

4. The compiled executables will be found in the directory.

5. Copy the binaries to a suitable location

CMake

1. We suggest to run CMake by out-of-source builds, which means all the compiled code goes into a _build directory separate from the source code.

2. If VTK is installed, type cmake -S. -B_build. Otherwise type cmake -S. -B_build -DUSE_VTK=OFF

3. Compile the code via cmake --build _build

4. In the main meshalyzer directory, you will find a link to the compiled executalbe.

ccmake

For those who are familiar with ccmake:

1. ccmake .

2. configure, edit and generate

3. make -j

Documentation

To compile the manual (LaTeX required)

1. cd manual
2. pdflatex manual
3. pdflatex manual

macOS

First of all, the command line tools or Xcode must be installed. Next, install the prerequisities using your package manager. We use homebrew as an example.

brew install libpng
brew install fltk
brew install freetype
brew install git
brew install cmake

Follow the steps in the Compiling to build the code.

Linux

For installing meshalyzer first you need to install the "Prerequisites" using your package manager (e.g. apt, yum, or dnf). The Dockerfile provides an installation example based on CentOS7.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu (tested with Ubuntu 20.04), you can use:

apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    build-essential \
    git \
    ca-certificates \
    fluid \
    freeglut3-dev \
    libfltk1.3-dev \
    libfreetype6 \
    libfreetype-dev \
    libglu1-mesa-dev \
    libpng-dev \
    libjpeg-dev \
    cmake

Follow the steps in Compiling to build the code.

CentOS

On CentOS (tested with CentOS 7), you can use:

yum update && yum install git \
gcc gcc-c++ \
libpng-devel \
libjpeg-devel \
fltk-devel \
fltk-fluid \
freetype \
freetype-devel \
freeglut-devel

If you want to compile meshalyzer with cmake, you will also need cmake version 3.12 or higher. You can know which version is provided by the package manager with the command:

yum info cmake

If the version is higher than 3.12, then use:

yum install cmake

Otherwise you can get cmake3 from EPEL. On CentOS 7, you can use:

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
yum install cmake3

Please note that you will then have to use the cmake3 command instead of the cmake command to compile meshalyzer.

You can now follow the steps in Compiling to build the code.

Windows

meshalyzer can be compiled to use the native windowing system under Cygwin.

Cygwin

First, install Cygwin and include the gcc compiler suite along with it. You will need to install at least the following packages:

• gcc-core
• gcc-g++
• cmake
• make
• colorgcc
• libgcc1
• libfreetype
• libfreetype-devel
• libuuid1
• libjpeg8
• libjpeg-devel
• libpng-devel
• libglut3
• libglut-devel
• libGL-devel
• libGL1
• libGLU1
• libGLU-devel
• zlib
• zlib-devel

Make sure libuuid-devel is NOT installed. Remove it if need be and be warned, it can be persistent.

To pre-select the packages during installation just run setup-x86_64.exe -P gcc-core gcc-g++ make libgcc1 colorgcc libuuid1 libjpeg8 libjpeg-devel libpng-devel libglut3 libglut-devel zlib zlib-devel libGL-devel libGL1 libGLU1 libGLU-devel from the Windows commandline.

FLTK

Do NOT use the Cygwin FLTK package. Download the source, and then open a Cygwin terminal. Unpack the source, cd to the top-level FLTK directory and execute. We use version 1.4.4 currently.

./configure --enable-cygwin
make -j
make install

If there is an error compiling fluid, change all ocurrences of_snprintf to snprintf in fluid/ExternalCodeEditor_WIN32.cxx

To compile meshalyzer, clone it, cd to the top-level source directory

make -j

Post-compilation

You can execute meshalyzer by typing ./meshalyzer

See README.md for an example.

To make meshalyzer available from anywhere on your machine, you need to copy it to your bin directory, or add the meshalyzer directory to PATH by editing your .bashrc (or .bash_profile). Using the nano editor as an example, type the following command into the terminal:

nano ~/.bashrc

This will open an editor, scroll all the way down and add the following line, replacing '/home/somefolder/anotherfolder/meshalyzer' with the path of your meshalyzer folder:

export PATH=$PATH:/home/somefolder/anotherfolder/meshalyzer

press Control+X, then type Y and Enter to save the changes. Close all terminal instances!

open a terminal and type meshalyzer