VTK binaries for GNU/Linux
                --------------------------

The tarballs in this directory contain binaries of VTK.  The builds
are made on a Debian GNU/Linux system (Stable).


What is supported:
------------------

 * VTK built with Python and Tcl support.
 * Hybrid and Patented classes.
 * Support for freetype, DICOM, GL2PS.
 * Comes with all the VTK headers.
 * Built with -g -O2 but the libraries are stripped to save space.  If
   needed I could also provide unstripped debug builds also.
 * Built using gcc as packaged with Debian.

Note that MayaVi should work properly with this package under Debian
GNU/Linux Woody (stable).


Requirements:
-------------

 * Python-2.3.1 or higher (as packaged in Debian stable) 

 * Tcl/Tk 8.4.

 * libc6: 2.3.x.  Not sure if this is a hard requirement.

 * It also requires XFree86 >= 4.1.0.  This should be pretty standard
   today.

 * Working OpenGL installation.  Even non-accelerated cards should
   work so long as your X server and OpenGL are installed OK.

I am not sure if this will work correctly under RedHat or Mandrake but
it just might.  Please do let me know if it does and I'll update this
file.


Installation:
-------------

Using GNU Stow:
---------------

The recommended approach to install this package would be to use GNU
Stow to manage the untarred directory.  More information on GNU Stow
is available here:

     http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/stow.html

The tarballs are actually created using a stowed package.  If you
haven't looked at GNU Stow yet, please do, it makes life much easier
when managing packages built from source and installed in /usr/local.
So, if you are using stow simply do the following:

 cd /usr/local/stow # or whereever your stow is.
 mkdir vtk
 cd vtk
 tar xjf path/to/downloaded/vtk-linux*.bz2
 cd ..
 stow -v vtk
 ldconfig

Thats it!  The next time you want to update the tarball do this:

 cd /usr/local/stow/vtk
 rm -rf *
 tar xjf path/to/downloaded/vtk-linux*.bz2
 cd ..
 stow -R -v vtk
 ldconfig

Getting stow to work takes some work and organization but once setup
its really useful.


Installing in /usr/local directly:
----------------------------------

If you don't want to use GNU Stow then the tarball can be extracted
directly into /usr/local.  The tarball contains directories called
bin, lib and include with all the VTK related files.  Untarring it,
and running ldconfig should basically do the job.

You also need to make sure that /usr/local/lib is in the linkers path.
This can be done by adding '/usr/local/lib' to /etc/ld.so.conf.


Installing elsewhere:
---------------------

If you want to install the tarball in personal directory, simply untar
the tarball in say $HOME/vtk/ and do the following (illustrated for
bash):

 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/vtk/lib
 PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$HOME/vtk/lib/python2.3/site-packages/vtk_python
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH PYTHONPATH

That should hopefully get everything working.


If you run into problems please email me.


Prabhu Ramachandran  <prabhu_r at users dot sf dot net>