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Getting_OpenWalnut

Getting OpenWalnut

OpenWalnut supports all three major platforms: Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. We are offering several ways of using OpenWalnut:

In this article, we explain how to install the binary packages and how to compile OpenWalnut yourself. If you have any troubles see the FAQ or contact us. Also have a look at the ReleaseNotes.

Binary Packages

The OpenWalnut team provides several binary packages of the current OpenWalnut releases. Besides this, the NeuroDebian project also provides OpenWalnut. This section explains how to install the different binary packages.

Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian-based Systems

Our packages are build using the NeuroDebian repository. This means, the packages we provide depend on third-party packages available in NeuroDebian. You first need to setup the NeuroDebian repository. We, therefore, refer to the documentation at http://neuro.debian.net/\#how-to-use-this-repository. Then update your package database by issuing

apt-get update

You now need to make a choice. Either use NeuroDebian's OpenWalnut build or directly use ours. The NeuroDebian build might be less up-to-date but the advantage of NeuroDebian is that you automatically get package updates.

1: Install from NeuroDebian:

apt-get install openwalnut openwalnut-modules

2: Install our Packages:

Download the matching DEB files.

IMPORTANT: You need to download all the files we provide for your distribution and remove any previous installed OpenWalnut packages.

Install these files using dpkg:

dpkg -i *.deb

This installs the downloaded DEB packages. But it will most likely complain about dependent packages. To solve this, use apt-get:

apt-get -f install

This installs the missing dependencies. If this fails, please check again that you have set-up NeuroDebian correctly and that you have downloaded all the DEB files we provide.

Other Linux distributions

Although we do not provide binaries for these distributions, you can always install a Debian chroot or the NeuroDebian virtual machine.

A more advanced option is to use alien, a package conversion tool. Please note that we are not able to support this.

Windows

Download one of the Windows packages. These are ZIP files. Simply extract them to your disk. In the extracted directory, you will find openwalnut.exe.

MacOS

We do not yet provide binaries for MacOS. Consider using the NeuroDebian virtual machine.

Platform-independent via NeuroDebian Virtual Machine

If you plan to use the NeuroDebian Project, Virtual Machine on your Windows or MacOS host, please refer to the according documentation on how to install software inside the virtual machine.

Once you got the virtual machine up and running, install the OpenWalnut software packages:

  • openwalnut-qt4
  • openwalnut-modules

Source Installation

Install prerequisites:

The following libaries and tools you need to have installed in order to compile: Qt, Boost, OpenSceneGraph, CMake, Eigen, Nifti, BioSig. See LibraryAndToolMatrix for minimum version requirements.

Depending on your operating system, there are different ways of installing them:

Debian and Ubuntu (For Ubuntu you might consider the FAQ when missing some packages):

apt-get install cmake libboost-all-dev libqt4-dev libqtwebkit-dev openscenegraph libopenscenegraph-dev libeigen3-dev libnifti-dev libbiosig-dev build-essential

Other Linux distributions: please consult your distributions documentation for more details.

Mac OSX: Install Homebrew in order to install additional software (except OpenSceneGraph):

brew install boost cmake qt5 eigen

Beside this, the only build dependency not yet met is niftilib, which is no longer available on homebrew, and OpenSceneGraph. Please install OpenSceneGraph from source (we recommend version 3.2.1).

As QT5 is deprecated on homebrew, you need to checkout the QT6 branch (work in progress) of OpenWalnut.

Windows: There is only one option at the moment: You have to use MinGW or MSYS2. Visual Studio is not supported at the moment. - Recommended: Windows Install with MSYS2 - Windows Install with MinGW

Please note, that if you want to contribute you should install some more tools like the unit testing framework, Doxygen, etc... see DeveloperGuidelines for further details.

Getting the source code

Generally you have two options to get the source code: Either getting the latest development snapshot from a source code repository, or downloading an archive. If unsure, checkout from the repository, for which you will need to have git installed.

Download from repository [Recommended]

Checking out current development from the repository with git. For more information see git.

git clone http://source.openwalnut.org OpenWalnut

Now you should have a directory called OpenWalnut, change to it! Now you are in the default branch, which is the current development status, but you also may change to specific releases, e.g.

git checkout Release_X.Y.Z

You can query the possible releases by asking git which tags we provide:

git tag

Please note that this repository is not writable! If you want to contribute to our project look here.

Downloading an archive:

Download one of the source archives in our downloads section. Depending on your operating system you may now extract the source code from the command line via

tar xzf OpenWalnut_X.Y.Z.tar.gz

or by using a graphical tool, like 7-zip on Windows.

Now you should have a directory called OpenWalnut, change to it!

Compiling and run

Linux

If you installed all the prerequisites, building OpenWalnut from scratch is very easy:

cd build
cmake ../src
make
bin/openwalnut

Do you have multiple CPU cores? Due to cmake's build dependency management, you can issue make with the -j (jobs) parameter to specify how many parallel build jobs should be started. This can tremendously decrease build time. The following snippet shows how to start 8 parallel build jobs:

make -j8

If you have installed doxygen, you can issue

cd build
make doc
your_browser ../doc/developer/html/index.html

MacOS X

Compiling on Mac OSX is basically the same as for Linux once all dependencies are installed. We highly recommend to use Homebrew as nearly all dependencies are available there and, most important, they are compatible with the new C++ stdlib from OSX 10.10.

Windows

On Windows, you need to use the MSYS2 environment. We do not support Visual Studio as its C++ compiler has certain limitations, causing OpenWalnut not to build properly.

For those of you who really want to use Visual Studio (from the bottom of their heart, with a deep love and a high frustration resistance) have a look at our new (as of 2022) try here