This document describes the VAPOR installation process for pre-compiled binaries on both UNIX and Windows systems. If you have not already done so, download an appropriate VAPOR image from the download site. Unless otherwise noted in the release notes below, pre-compiled binaries are built with compiler optimization enabled, IDL support turned on, and SGI Volumizer support turned off. Sites requiring a different configuration will need to build VAPOR from source code.

OpenGL Graphics Drivers

For best rendering performance it is imperative that hardware accelerated graphics are available on your system, and that an OpenGL driver, optimized for use with your graphics card, is installed. Under some operating systems, notably Linux, the hardware may be present, but the driver is absent (or misconfigured). The command below may be helpful on Linux systems for determining if your OpenGL driver is properly configured (look for the presence of either the nVidia or ATI vendor string, as appropriate for your hardware):

glxinfo | grep version

Note that Linux is notorius for uninstalling vendor-provided OpenGL drivers during OS upgrades

Installing on UNIX

The binary installation process for UNIX is comprised of three basic steps: 1) unpacking the distribution image, 2) running the installation script, and 3) setting up the user environment.

Unpacking

Unpack the compressed tar file containing VAPOR into a scratch workspace (e.g. /tmp) and change working directories to the distribution subdirectory . The following commands might be used to unpack VAPOR version 1.0 on a Linux x86_64 system, for example:

gunzip vapor-1.0.0-Linux_x86_64.tar.gz

tar xf vapor-1.0.0-Linux_x86_64.tar

cd vapor-1.0.0-Linux_x86_64

Installing

Next, run the vapor-install.csh installation script providing a single argument informing the script of where to install VAPOR. For example the command

./vapor-install.csh /usr/local/apps/vapor-1.0.0

would install VAPOR executables, libraries, and examples in the directory /usr/local/apps/vapor-1.0.0

NOTE: The target of the vapor-install script ( /usr/local/apps/vapor-1.0.0, in the above example) must NOT be the same path as the directory where you unpacked the tar file or you will overwrite the installation image.

User Environment Setup

The VAPOR suite of applications relies on a number of shared libraries. Unless VAPOR and all of its dependencies are installed in a directory known by the run time loader, users will be required to execute a configuration script prior to running any VAPOR commands. The script vapor_home/bin/vapor-setup.sh should be sourced by all users before starting a VAPOR session, where vapor_home is the the path to the VAPOR installation directory (/usr/local/apps/vapor-1.0 in our previous example) For convenience it is advised that users place this command in their login script (.login for C shell or .profile for other shells). Once the variables are set in the login script, there is no need to run the environment script files for each session.

Installing on Max OS X

On the Mac OS X platform VAPOR is installed via a Mac installation package, delivered as a disk image. Installation is trivial:

1. Download the disk image file vapor-x.x.x-Darwin_platform.dmg, where 'x.x.x' is the version number, and platform is one of i386 (intel binaries), powerpc, or universal.
2. Double click disk image file.
3. The Mac OS X Finder will open a window displaying the VAPOR installation package file. Double click on the installation package file and follow the Mac OS X Installer directions.

User Environment Setup

The VAPOR installer on the Mac will permit the VAPOR application bundle to be installed wherever the user chooses. However, to facilitate access to command line utilities, symbolic links are created within /usr/local/{bin,lib} pointing to VAPOR executables and shared libraries within the application bundle. Thus the user's search path should contain /usr/local/bin. Similarly, users wishing to use VAPOR with IDL will need to set the IDL_DLM_PATH and DYLD_LIBARARY_PATH environment variables to /usr/local/lib. As a convenience, users may simply source the /usr/local/bin/vapor-setup.csh script (/usr/local/bin/vapor-setup.sh for bourne shell users).

Installing on Windows

If you have previously installed VAPOR (version 1.0.x) on your Windows system, you should delete that installation (versions 1.0.x did not use an uninstaller) as follows:

1. Remove the former vapor bin directory (vapor-x.x.x/bin) from your Windows execution path. To do this, click on Start->Settings->Control Panel->System. On the "Advanced" tab, click "Environment Variables", select "path", and click "edit". Remove the vapor bin path and the following semi-colon from the list.
2. Delete the VAPOR executables that you installed.
3. If you put the VAPOR bin directory in your IDL_DLM_PATH, you should remove it.  Click on Start->Settings->Control Panel->System. On the "Advanced" tab, click "Environment Variables", and edit the IDL_DLM_PATH, removing the path to the former VAPOR bin directory.

Next, to install VAPOR:

1. If you are using antivirus software, you should disable it during the installation, as it may interfere with the execution of some scripts that are run during the install.
2. Download the file vapor-x.x.x-win32.msi where ‘x.x.x’ is the version number. 
3. Double-click on the downloaded .msi file to begin the installation.  The default installation will install VAPOR in the Program Files directory. 
4. On some older versions of windows your system may not be able to execute the msi installer.  On these systems, you should in addition download the file vapor-x.x.x-win32extras.zip, unzipping it into the same directory where you downloaded the file vapor-x.x.x-win32.msi.  Then double-click on Setup.exe in that directory.

You can launch the VAPOR user interface by double-clicking on the vaporgui  icon on your desktop.  If you double-click on a VAPOR session file (*.vss) or on a VAPOR metadata file (*.vdf), this will launch the VAPOR user interface, and initialize it with the specified file. You can also launch the VAPOR user interface and the other VAPOR executables (raw2vdf, vdf2raw, vdfcreate) by typing the command into a windows command shell.  If you have IDL installed on your system, you are set up for using the VAPOR IDL library.

Platform Specific Installation Notes

Version 1.2.2

Windows Vista

While installing on Vista, User Account Control (UAC) should be temporarily disabled.

Version 1.0.0

Linux_ia64

Linux_ia64 binaries are compiled without IDL support. At this time RSI does not offer IDL on the Intel IA64 platform. You may of course run Linux_i386 binaries with IDL support on IA64 platforms, albeit with degraded performance and limited memory.