See Also (Re)Building and Updating the Code Help and Suggestions

Firstly, you need the following free utilities on your system before you can get started:

Both the gzip and tar compression utilities
GNU make
A C++ compiler (CC or gcc/g++ or EGCS (advanced g++ compiler))

To install the program after you downloaded it (see Obtain) and unzipped it with the command gunzip LCAVision.tar.gz and untarred it with the command tar xvf LCAVision.tar, you need to do the following.

1) Make certain before trying to build that you have all the necessary libraries somewhere on your system. LCAVision's support libraries, like LCAVision itself, are all open-source and freely distributed. The upside to that is we can make you a really powerful program at no cost to us or you. The downside is that it means a little more work for you in initial setup to keep apace with the changes as we make them. So once again here goes the checklist of what LCAVision needs and what you need to install on your system for LCAVision to build:

vtk3.x (or back to 2.4 and make sure when configuring to build with patented) at http://www.kitware.com/vtk.html
fltk-1.0.9 or later at http://www.fltk.org
flexio at the cactuscode pserver CVS FlexIO repository.
HDF 4.1 release 3 or later at http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu
HDF 5 release 1.3.x and later
tcpxx at the cactuscode pserver CVS TCPXX repository

2) There is a file in the LCAVision1.0 directory called build. Open that file and replace the message between and including the < and > on each line with the actual path to your copy of the open source distribution from above.

Lastly, so that LCAVision can find colormaps, the Cactus remote isosurfacer plugin, and other files it may need, create an environment variable in your .login or .cshrc file called LCAVISION and give it the full path (up to and including) the LCAVision directory. For example (and if possible change your shell to tc shell for right now for installing if it isn't already with the command tcsh):
setenv LCAVISION /usr/local/bin/LCAVision1.0/LCAVision
To see your changes immediately without having to logout and log in, in the same directory as the profile script you just edited, type the following on the command line:
source .login or source .cshrc (or whichever environment profile script file you just edited).

This same setenv command can also be issued on the command line for immediate results, although you'll have to do it each time you log in if you choose to set your environment this way.
Either way, you can see that the environment variable was set properly by typing:
printf $LCAVISION or echo $LCAVISION

3) After you are done with that, save the file, go back to your terminal and type:

source build or, on some systems just build

The build program will do the following:
1. run configure on LCA Vision's AMR library
2. build the AMR library
3. run configure on the Cactus isosurface viewer
4. build the Cactus isosurface viewer
5. run configure on LCA Vision itself
6. build LCA Vision
After you typed build your interference is no longer necessary. It will take awhile, so just check back periodically.
When the thing is done building, just type Vision1.0 (all one word) to run the program. That's the executable name. You may need to type ./Vision1.0.

Some problems you may encounter are that Vision currently needs to link with static (.a) and not dynamic or shared (.o) library files, and sometimes depending on your system, these conflict. If this is the case, then you need to alias the shared files to the static ones, move the shared library files aside, or give the full path to the library files on the link line in the makefiles.

After editing makefiles manually, be careful not to use the build script, of course, as it will try to recreate makefiles, overwriting any changes you made. You have to just use make or make -f newmakefile in the directories where you made the necessary changes. The autoconf routine can get you most of the way to successful building, but due to idiosyncracies across systems, you may have some tweaking to do.

Like for instance, depending on your system, you may encounter weirdness with linking to GL. The lines to pay attention to here in the Vision and CactusRmtIsoView makefiles are the FL_INCLUDE and GLLIBS lines with respect to the location of OpenGL and/or MESA on your system.