VAPOR depends on a small number of 3rd party applications. Before you can begin the installation of VAPOR from source you must verify the existence of these 3rd party packages and know where they live on your system. If the VAPOR 3rd party dependencies do not already exist, or if they have incompatible version numbers, you must acquire and install appropriate versions. Note, in many instances a mismatched version number, particulary a higher version number than what is recommend, will cause no harm.
The list of 3rd party libaries used to build a specific release of VAPOR are available here. Some of the dependencies will specify flags that will need to be applied when built from source. If no flags are specified, binary installations may be used.
For best rendering performance it is imperative that hardware accelerated graphics are available on your system, and that an OpenGL driver, optimized for use with your graphics card, is installed. Under some operating systems, notably Linux, the hardware may be present, but the driver is absent (or misconfigured). The command below may be helpful on Linux systems for determining if your OpenGL driver is properly configured (look for the presence of either the nVidia or ATI vendor string, as appropriate for your hardware):
glxinfo | grep version
Note that Linux is notorius for uninstalling vendor-provided OpenGL drivers during OS upgrades.
