Installation Introduction

Installation Guide

1. Installation introduction

This section describes the global computing environment required for installing the Geant4 toolkit. To set up your specific computing environment for Geant4, refer to section 2. of this Installation Guide.

Since release 3.2, a shell script (Configure) is provided to facilitate the installation procedure, and help the user to set up correctly his/her environment.

1.1 Supported computers and operating systems

Geant4 is supported under the following operating systems:

Flavors of Unix (from vendors: SUN)
Linux on PC with g++ (gcc compiler)
Windows/2000/XP with MicroSoft Visual C++

Currently, this is the set of flavors which can be associated with the environment variable $G4SYSTEM to identify the system architecture and compiler used:

    UNIX    - SUN-SunOS v.5.8, CC Forte Developer 7
              C++ 5.4 Patch 111715-05           G4SYSTEM: SUN-CC
    Linux   - Linux RedHat 7.3, g++ gcc 2.95.2
                             or g++ gcc-3.2     G4SYSTEM: Linux-g++
    Windows - Windows 2000 or XP
              and Cygwin32, MSVC++ 6.0 SP5      G4SYSTEM: WIN32-VC

For a more detailed description of platforms/compilers supported and versions of third party software, please refer to the release notes available with the current release you're using in geant4/ReleaseNotes (also accessible from the web distribution page).

1.2 Required software

To run Geant4, the following software must be properly installed in your computing environment:

C++ compiler
(compiler from Unix vendor, g++ or Visual C++ for Windows systems)
CLHEP library
(see CLHEP reference guide cern.ch/clhep/manual/RefGuide)
Native STL (*)
GNU Make (note: g++ preprocessing is used to build file dependencies) is also used and a UNIX shell
This Geant4 toolkit source code

(*) STL, the Standard Template Library is required.

1.3 Visualization software

The list of software above is the minimum software requirement for a non-graphical setup of Geant4. To use visualization graphics in Geant4 and/or a graphical user interface (GUI), at least one of the following graphic systems or packages is required in your computing environment:

X Windows
OpenGL or MesaGL (free software compatible with OpenGL)
DAWN, a PostScript renderer
Open Inventor or HEP Inventor (requires OpenGL/MesaGL and Hepvis)
OPACS and Open Scientist (Interactive environment, including GUI)
Momo (a Java-based GUI environment, GGE, GPE, ...)
VRML browser

Alternatively, you can produce an ascii file for VRML or DAWN.

More information is available in Section 8.6, Visualization Drivers, of the User's Guide for Application Developers.

1.4 Software for Analysis and Histogramming

Histogramming facilities are provided through the AIDA abstract interface, which in this case needs to be installed as well:

AIDA (Abstract Interfaces for Data Analysis)

External packages which are compliant with AIDA and providing all necessary functionalities for doing histogramming (and therefore, should be optionally installed) are the following:

JAS (Java Analysis Studio)
Lizard (AIDA Interactive Analysis Environment)
Open Scientist (Interactive Analysis Environment)

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