Build Linux

Platform requirements

The open source and NREL release-build platform is CentOS 7 and has been built on Ubuntu 16.04, Fedora 25 and Mint 18.2. The minimum gcc version supported is 4.8.5 and the minimum libc support is 2.17. The gcc and libc versions can be found by:

gcc --version   
ldd --version

Before you begin, you will need to install git and g++ if they are not already installed. For example:

sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get install g++

1. Clone the SolTrace code repository

1. The source code for the LK, WEX, and SolarPILOT projects should go in a single parent directory. The git clone command automatically creates a directory for the repository, so you do not need to create a directory before you clone it. You may first need to install git with sudo apt install git.

   cd st_dev
   for repo in lk wex SolTrace ; do git clone https://github.com/nrel/$repo ; done
   

   Note. You can also download the repositories from GitHub as .zip files instead of cloning them. If you do that, be sure to extract them into directories named lk, wex, and SolTrace so that the makefiles can find them.

2. The following packages are required and can be downloaded from apt-get: build-essential, libgtk2.0-dev, libgl1-mesa-dev, mesa-common-dev, freeglut3-dev, and libcurl4-openssl-dev.

   sudo apt-get install <PACKAGE NAME>
   

2. Install wxWidgets-3.1.0

1. Download wxWidgets-3.1.0 (https://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/) source code for Linux.

2. From a terminal, unzip the file to a permanent folder like /home/<USERNAME>/wxWidgets-3.1.0:

   tar xvfj wxWidgets-3.1.0.tar.bz2
   

3. Create a new folder in the wxWidgets folder you created in Step 2 so that each build can be installed to a different folder (remember to change /path/to to the actual path):

   cd /path/to/wxWidgets-3.1.0
   mkdir release-build
   

4. Call configure with the following options (again, remember to change /path/to to the path to your wxWidgets-3.1.0 folder):

   ./configure --prefix=/path/to/wxWidgets-3.1.0 --enable-shared=no --enable-stl=yes --enable-debug=no --with-gtk=2 --with-libjpeg=builtin --with-libpng=builtin --with-regex=builtin --with-libtiff=builtin --with-zlib=builtin --with-expat=builtin --without-libjbig --without-liblzma --without-gtkprint --with-libnotify=no --with-libmspack=no --with-gnomevfs=no --with-opengl=yes --with-sdl=no --with-cxx=11
   

5. Once configure is done, call make, and then make install from within /path/to/wxWidgets-3.1.0

6. Look for wx-config in /path/to/wxWidgets-3.1.0/release-build/bin and make a note of the complete path.

7. Create a wx-config-3 symbolic link pointing to the path you found in Step 6 so that the makefiles can find the correct wxWidgets version to run:

   sudo ln -s /path/to/wx-config /usr/bin/wx-config-3
   

8. Test the wxWidgets build:

wx-config-3 --cflags

If the build was successful, you should see:

-I/usr/<USERNAME>/wxWidgets-3.1.0/release-build/lib/wx/include/gtk2-unicode-static-3.1 -I/usr/<USERNAME>/wxWidgets-3.1.0/release-build/include/wx-3.1 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -DwxDEBUG_LEVEL=0 -D__WXGTK__ -pthread

3. Set Environment Variables

Environment variables store values for programs and processes on your computer. The SolTrace build script use two environment variables to determine where the files it needs are stored on your computer. Before building the projects, you should set the following environment variables to point to each of the project folders you created in Step 1.

Name	Value (Folder Path)
LKDIR	/path/to/lk/
WEXDIR	/path/to/wex

4. Install LK, WEX, then SolTrace

1. For LK and WEX, in that order, go to the build_linux folder and call make. A fatal error like "wx/string.h no such file or directory" might be caused by an incorrect wx-config-3 symbolic link or a problem with the wxWidgets build.

2. Go to /path/to/SolTrace/coretrace/build_linux and call make. This builds the ray tracing engine that is used by SolTrace.

3. Go to /path/to/SolTrace/app/build_linux and call make. This builds the desktop application.

6. Run the application

To run the app, go to the deploy folder at /path/to/SolTrace/deploy/linux/ and run ./soltrace.