Installation requirements

Building nmag core using the small tarball requires a number of libraries from the system, including:

• atlas3.6.0
• findlib-1.2.1
• gsl-1.14
• hdf5-1.8.7
• ipython-0.10
• mpich2-1.2.1p1
• numarray-1.5.2
• numpy-1.5.0
• ocaml-3.12.0
• ocamlgsl-0.6.0
• ParMetis-3.1.1
• petsc-lite-3.1-p5
• ply-3.3
• py-0.9.1
• Python-2.7.2
• PyVTK-0.latest
• qhull-2003.1
• sundials-2.3.0
• tables-2.1.2

The version numbers listed above are those of the libraries that are included in the big tarball and for which nmag 0.2 core is known to compile. You may be able to deviate from these but if the library has changed its interface, the compilation may fail (as the changed interface would require updates to the nmag/nsim source code). In this case, the most practical advise would be to install from the big tarball (that brings all the libraries with it).

You also need a sane build environment.

If you are running Ubuntu 11.10, have a look at the section Ubuntu 11.10 below which details how to install these requirements.

Depending on hardware characteristics, compilation will take a few minutes.

Download

Download the tarball from here.

Configure

Untar the archive in its final location:

$ tar xvzf nmag-core-0.2.0.tar.gz

(Once the package has been compiled, you won't be able to move the nmag-0.2.0 directory to another location. Doing so would make the package unusable, since absolute paths are hard-coded inside the executables).

Then:

$ cd nmag-core-0.2.0

and run the configure.py script using the Python interpreter which you want to use for Nmag:

$ python configure.py

Build

Run:

$ make

to build the software

and:

$ make install

to create the executables. By default the "installation" takes place in the local directory, not /usr/local or such. (In theory this might be possible using configuration flags but is untested.)

To add all nmag executables to the system path add the subdirectory bin to your system path, for example:

$ export PATH=$PATH:`pwd`/bin

(This is not required for the testing below, just convenience for later use of Nmag.)

Testing

To run the tests, the following steps need to be executed (from the installation directory in which make and make install where executed):

The we let the testing subsystem find the executable and store the path in the testing directories:

$ cd tests/config/
$ ../../bin/nsim setup.py
$ cd ../..

In the second line above, it is important to run the file setup.py which the nsim executable that we just installed -- this way its path is identified, and stored in the testing subdirectories.

Finally, we can run the tests in the subdirectory tests:

$ cd tests
$ make check
$ make checkslow

Special instructions

$ sudo aptitude install libpetsc3.1-dev libpetsc3.1  \
libfindlib-ocaml-dev libqhull-dev python-tables python-ply \
libparmetis-dev python-dev python-py libreadline-dev python-pyvtk

mkdir -p build-sundials
cd build-sundials
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/357850/libs/sundials-2.3.0.tar.gz
tar xfvz sundials-2.3.0.tar.gz
cd sundials-2.3.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared
make
sudo make install
cd ../..