Introduction

This tutorial is for building PARTONS on Linux. It describes the procedure for a Debian-like distribution (Ubuntu, etc). For RPM-based distributions, it should not be too different.

Setup

Installing the external libraries

All the external libraries should be available through the package manager:

sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev libcln-dev libsfml-dev libqt4-dev libqt4-sql-mysql libgsl-dev

You can use any of your favorite dpkg front-ends (apt, aptitude, apt-get...), but be sure that it installs the recommended packages as dependencies. On Debian, you might want to use su to switch to root first, instead of using sudo directly from your current user. For an old Debian, it might be necessary to build libraries from their sources, as e.g. the version of SFML from Debian Wheezy does not work.

CMake

CMake is the main tool to achieve multi-platform compilation. Install it with your package manager:

sudo apt-get install cmake

PARTONS source code

Visit this page to download PARTONS' source code. To achieve this, you may need the Git command line tool. It can be installed in the following way:

sudo apt-get install git

Building the source code

This section is for building the projects without using any Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Skip it and see this tutorial if you want to use Eclipse.

We will detail the procedure in the case of elementary-utils. For other PARTONS sub-projects, the procedure is exactly the same.

Go to the build directory and call CMake in the following way:

cd elementary-utils/build/

cmake -G"Unix Makefiles" ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

You can replace -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug with -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release to speed up the executable execution, if you do not need to use a debugger.

If everything went fine, you can build the project with

make

You need to repeat the procedure for the other projects, that is for numa, partons and partons-example. Always do the compilation in the order that has been specified here, i.e. elementary-utils first and partons-example last, as the projects depend on each other.

Installing the PARTONS libraries

You can keep the generated shared libraries libElementaryUtils.so, libNumA++.so and libPARTONS.so in their folders (lib in each sub-project), and use them from there. Alternatively, you can install these libraries to your system with this command:

make install

which should be executed from the build directory as described above for make.

By default, CMake chooses system folders for the installation (such as /usr or /usr/local). You need root privileges to install to these folders - use sudo or su to grant the access if you have it. If you wish to install to local user folders (for example somewhere in /home), which does not require root privileges, you need to change the CMake variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, e.g.:

cmake -G"Unix Makefiles" ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="/home/youruser/somefolder"

instead of what was specified above.

This will allow you to install the headers to /home/youruser/somefolder/include/PARTONS and the shared libraries to /home/youruser/somefolder/lib/PARTONS instead of e.g. /usr/local/include/PARTONS and /usr/local/lib/PARTONS.

Building your own project using PARTONS

The project partons-example is meant to serve as an example for projects making use of PARTONS libraries. You can use it as a template for your own projects.

Except the main function encoded in main.cpp, you may be also interested in the following components of partons-example, that you can adapt to your needs:

CMakeLists.txt: CMake configuration file;
cmake/Modules/FindXXXX.cmake: CMake modules for finding external libraries;
partons.properties, logger.properties and environment_configuration.dat: PARTONS configuration files (for more details see this tutorial).