Installation of VTK

Requirements

• make
• build-essential
• cmake
• mesa-common-dev
• mesa-utils
• freeglut3-dev

sudo apt install make build-essential cmake mesa-common-dev mesa-utils freeglut3-dev

Installation

The following installation guide is based on the documentation of VTK.

Clone the VTK repository

To install VTK on a Linux machine, first clone the repository from GitLab.

git clone https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk.git

We recommend using version 9.1 in combination with t8code, so checkout into the respective branch. An older version of VTK may cause errors.

cd vtk
git checkout v9.1.0
cd ..

Configure

After choosing your desired version of VTK create a build directory

mkdir vtk_build
cd ~/vtk_build

The next step is to choose your configuration and create the Makefiles. There are several settings available for the VTK build, we are mainly interested in two. The first is to enable VTK_USE_MPI, since we want to run VTK in parallel. An MPI implementation is required for that. The second one is to set up the install directory by setting up CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX.

You can either call the CMake interface ccmake and set the options up. Afterward, you just call cmake. This way you get an overview of all to configure options.

ccmake ../vtk
cmake ../vtk

You also can pass the related flags to CMake and do it in one step:

cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/opt/vtk_install -D VTK_USE_MPI=ON ../vtk  

Note, use a different folder for your source, build and install. Otherwise, errors might occur.

Build and install

After configuring and creating the Makefile you can build and install

make -j
make install

Linking against VTK

To use VTK you also need to adapt your PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/opt/vtk_install/bin" >> $HOME/.bashrc
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/opt/vtk_install/lib" >> $HOME/.bashrc

Configure t8code

To use the VTK library within t8code you need to set up some additional options in the configure script of t8code. The following lines need to be passed to the configure script:

--with-vtk 
--with-vtk_version_number=9.1 
LDFLAGS=-L$HOME/opt/vtk_install/lib 
CPPFLAGS=-I$HOME/opt/vtk_install/include/vtk-9.1

For a quick release mode, a configuration we recommend would be:

configure --enable-mpi --with-vtk --with-vtk_version_number=9.1 CFLAGS="-O3" CXXFLAGS="-O3" CC=mpicc CXX=mpicxx LDFLAGS=-L$HOME/opt/vtk_install/lib CPPFLAGS=-I$HOME/opt/vtk_install/include/vtk-9.1

For more information about configuring and installing t8code see Installation Guide and Configure Options.