The text below describes the process for building and installing VAPOR on UNIX platforms. For help with Windows source code installation please send us mail.

Dependencies

3rd Party Applications

VAPOR depends on a small number of 3rd party applications. Before you can begin the installation of VAPOR you must verify the existence of these 3rd party packages and know where they live on your system. If the VAPOR 3rd party dependencies do not already exist, or if they have incompatible version numbers, you must acquire and install appropriate versions. The table below list all 3rd party applications, providing the version number for which VAPOR has been tested against, and a URL for obtaining the software if needed. Note, in many instances a mismatched version number, particulary a higher version number than what is recommend, will cause no harm. Try it and see if it works.

In addition to the required Open Source libraries described above, a number of optional, commercial applications exist that may enhance VAPOR's capabilities. These not-for-free packages are described below.

OpenGL 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.

Unpacking

After resolving any of VAPOR library dependencies as described above, you are ready to begin the build process. If you haven't done so already, download the source tar file. After downloading, uncompress and unpack the tar file, and then change working directories to the VAPOR source directory by using the following commands or their equivalents:

gunzip vapor-x.x.x-src.tar.gz

tar xf vapor-x.x.x-src.tar

cd vapor-x.x.x-src

where 'x.x.x' is the VAPOR version number.

Configuration

The first step in the compilation process is to edit the top-level options.mk file. This file contains gmake Makefile macros that are used to inform the build system of the locations of various 3rd party packages, and also allows you to configure various optional components. In particular, the macros with EXPAT, NETCDF, and QTDIR prefixes will in most cases need to be defined to point to the locations of various library and header file paths. Other macros of interest are the INSTALL_PREFIX and IDL macros which tell the build system where to install VAPOR, and control whether IDL support routines are generated, respectively. The most up-to-date, and complete descriptions of these and other variables are found as comments in the options.mk file itself.

Compiling and Installing

Once the VAPOR installation system has been configured, you may compile by simply typing:

gmake

The build process takes anywhere from a few minutes to a half an hour. After compiling the software, executable and libraries may be installed by executing

gmake install

Executables, libraries, and header files will be installed to the installation target directory defined previously in the configuration step.

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 value of the INSTALL_PREFIX_DIR macro found in the options.mk file used to configure vapor. 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.