Installing on Linux

This section is for users who wish to install RMG on Linux and other Unix-like systems. RMG should successfully run on a variety of distributions, including Ubuntu.

Dependencies

To install RMG on a Linux-based system, you must first install the following dependencies. In general, the first place you should go to install these dependencies is your distribution’s software package managing software, as suitable software packages are usually available via your distribution’s online repository, if not already installed.

Java SE Development Kit (JDK)

Version 6 of the official implementation from Oracle (previously Sun Microsystems) is known to work; OpenJDK may also work but has not been tested by the RMG team.

A Fortran compiler

We recommend gfortran from the free GNU Compiler Collection. g95 is another free compiler that is known to work, but is less likely to be available within your distribution’s package repository.

The Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) and Linear Algebra PACKage (LAPACK)

You may need to install the development version of these packages in order to obtain the correct type of libraries for RMG to link to. BLAS and LAPACK may already be installed, as they are used in many common applications.

GNU make

The provided build scripts have the form of Makefiles that are executed by GNU make.

Apache Ant

ant is used to generate Java executables.

Compiling From Source

1. If you have not already done so, download RMG using one of the methods described on the downloading RMG page.

2. Unpack the RMG source code (if necessary) and move it to the desired installation directory. Depending on where you choose to install RMG, you may need superuser privileges to do this.

3. Set the RMG environment variable to the path of your desired installation directory. As an example, let us say you placed the RMG package files at /usr/local/rmg. If you are using a bash shell, use the command

   $ export RMG=/usr/local/rmg

   If you are using a C shell, use the command,

   $ setenv RMG /usr/local/rmg

   To avoid typing this line each time, append it to your ~/.bashrc (bash shell) or ~/.cshrc (C shell) file. This will cause the RMG variable to be automatically set each time you initialize a terminal in the future.

4. From the root of the RMG installation directory, run make to compile RMG. This will compile all of the Fortran dependencies and the main Java executable.

   $ cd $RMG
   $ make

   Without any options, make will assume that you are using gfortran as your compiler. If you are using g95 instead, use this version of the make command instead:

   $ make F90=g95

   You can also compile the Java code independently by running the following from the root RMG installation directory:

   $ ant jar

   If all of the above steps were completed successfully, then you should have a working version of RMG ready for use. You should see several executables and one JAR file appear in the $RMG/bin folder.

5. To test that RMG is working, you can try to run one of the examples, such as the “minimal” example, via commands similar to

   $ cd $RMG/examples/RMG/minimal
   $ java -jar $RMG/bin/RMG.jar condition.txt

Now that you have a working version of RMG, you may wish to install some of the optional features. Once you are ready to run RMG, continue to learning how to create RMG input files, either by hand or via the graphical user interface.