VAPOR is available in both binary installation packages and full source installation. Instructions are provided for both types of install. Make sure to review the Dependencies and Release Notes before beginning your installation.
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
This document describes the VAPOR installation process for pre-compiled binaries on UNIX. If you have not already done so, download an appropriate VAPOR image from the download site. Unless otherwise noted in the release notes below, pre-compiled binaries are built with compiler optimization enabled, and IDL support turned on. Sites requiring a different configuration will need to build VAPOR from source code.
The binary installation process for UNIX is comprised of three basic steps: 1) unpacking the distribution image, 2) running the installation script, and 3) setting up the user environment.
Unpack the compressed tar file containing VAPOR into a scratch workspace (e.g. /tmp) and change working directories to the distribution subdirectory. The following commands might be used to unpack VAPOR version 1.0 on a Linux x86_64 system, for example:
gunzip vapor-2.0.0-Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
tar xf vapor-2.0.0-Linux_x86_64.tar
cd vapor-2.0.0-Linux_x86_64
Next, run the vapor-install.csh installation script providing a single argument informing the script of where to install VAPOR. For example the command
./vapor-install.csh /usr/local/apps
would install VAPOR executables, libraries, and examples in the directory /usr/local/apps/vapor-version, where version is the current version number. For example: /usr/local/apps/vapor-2.0.0
The VAPOR suite of applications relies on a number of shared libraries and other dependencies. Users are required to execute a configuration script prior to running any VAPOR commands. For convenience it is advised that users place this command in their login script (.login for C shell or .profile for other shells). Once the variables are set in the login script, there is no need to run the environment script files for each session.
C-shell derivative users (csh, tcsh) If you are a C-shell (csh, tcsh) user you must execute the following command prior to running any VAPOR utilities:
source vapor_home/bin/vapor-setup.csh
where vapor_home is the root of the installation directory for VAPOR (e.g. /usr/local/apps/vapor-2.0.0) Bourne shell derivative users (ksh, bash, sh) If you are a Bourne shell (sh, bash, ksh) user you must execute the following command prior to running any VAPOR utilities:
. vapor_home/bin/vapor-setup.sh
where vapor_home is the root of the installation directory for VAPOR (e.g. /usr/local/apps/vapor-2.0.0). Note the "." is the bourne shell command for sourcing a file. |
Only command line utilities are distributed: the VAPOR GUI is NOT included.
This document describes the VAPOR installation process for pre-compiled binaries on Windows systems. If you have not already done so, download an appropriate VAPOR image from the download site. Unless otherwise noted in the release notes below, pre-compiled binaries are built with compiler optimization enabled, and IDL support turned on. Sites requiring a different configuration will need to build VAPOR from source code.
To install VAPOR on Vista systems, a modification to the above instructions is required: User Account Control (UAC) should be temporarily disabled. To disable UAC, from the control panel, select "user accounts", and click "turn off user account control". You will need to restart your system after UAC is disabled. Then proceed to follow the above instructions for Windows XP and 2000. After the installation is complete, UAC can be re-enabled and the system will need to be restarted again.
You can bypass disabling of UAC for installation (avoid two restarts) as follows:
You can launch the VAPOR user interface by double-clicking on the vaporgui 
icon on your desktop. If you double-click on a
VAPOR session file (*.vss) or on a VAPOR metadata file (*.vdf), this will
launch the VAPOR user interface, and initialize it with the specified file.
You can also launch the VAPOR user interface and the other VAPOR executables
(raw2vdf, vdf2raw, vdfcreate, wrfvdfcreate, wrf2vdf, ncdf2vdf,etc, ) by typing the command into a windows (DOS)
command shell. If you have IDL installed on your system, you are already set
up for using the VAPOR IDL library.
If you previously installed VAPOR version 1.0.x on your Windows system, and did not uninstall it, you should uninstall it as follows:
This document describes the VAPOR installation process for pre-compiled binaries on Mac OS X systems. If you have not already done so, download an appropriate VAPOR image from the download site. Unless otherwise noted in the release notes below, pre-compiled binaries are built with compiler optimization enabled, and IDL support turned on. Sites requiring a different configuration will need to build VAPOR from source code.
On the Mac OS X platform VAPOR is installed via a Mac installation package, delivered as a disk image. Installation is trivial:
The VAPOR installer provided for the Mac will install the VAPOR application bundle under /Applications/VAPOR.app. The important instructions below assume the default installation location is chosen.
C-shell derivative users (csh, tcsh) If you are a C-shell (csh, tcsh) user you must execute the following command prior to running any VAPOR command line utilities:
source /Applications/VAPOR.app/Contents/MacOS/vapor-setup.csh
Bourne shell derivative users (ksh, bash, sh) If you are a Bourne shell (sh, bash, ksh) user you must execute the following command prior to running any VAPOR command line utilties:
. /Applications/VAPOR.app/Contents/MacOS/vapor-setup.sh
|
Note: We strongly recommend using the binary installation whenever possible, and only trying to install from source as a last recourse.
VAPOR depends on a small number of 3rd party applications. Before you can begin the installation of VAPOR 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. The table below list all 3rd party applications, providing the version number for which VAPOR has been tested against, and a URL for obtaining the software if needed. Note, in many instances a mismatched version number, particulary a higher version number than what is recommend, will cause no harm. Try it and see if it works.
| Library | Version | Description | URL | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expat | 2.0.1 | XML Parser |
http://expat.sourceforge.net or download version 2.0.1 source from here or windows binary from here. |
|
| Qt | 3.3.8b (vapor <= 1.5.2) 4.6.1 (vapor >= 2.0) |
Qt (formerly Trolltech's) cross platform development environment | http://qt.nokia.com/ or simply download 3.3.8b from here , or 4.6.1 from here. |
Qt must be compiled with threads enabled. Open Source versions of Qt for Windows are not available at this time. On the Mac Qt 4.x must be configured with "-cocoa" |
| netCDF | 4.0.1 | Network Common Data Form | http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf | netCDF must be compiled with -fPIC on x86_64 and ia64 architectures. |
| PROJ.4 | 4.7.0 | Cartographics Projections Library | http://trac.osgeo.org/proj/ or download from here |
check the Windows install instructions for a prebuilt version |
| TIFF | 3.8.2 | TIFF Library | http://www.libtiff.org/ | check the Windows install instructions for a prebuilt version |
| GeoTIFF | 1.2.5 | Interchange format for georeferenced raster imagery. |
http://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/ or download from here |
check the Windows install instructions for a prebuilt version |
| Python | 2.6.5 | Python interpreted language | http://www.python.org/ | Not compatible with version 2.7.x or 3.x |
| NumPy | 1.5.0 | Scientific computuing module for python | http://numpy.scipy.org/ | |
| Glew | 1.5.1 | OpenGL extension library | http://glew.sourceforge.net/ | |
| HDF5 | 1.8.3 | scientific data model | http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/ |
In addition to the required Open Source libraries described above, a number of optional, commercial applications exist that may enhance VAPOR's capabilities. These not-for-free packages are described below.
| Package | Version | Description | URL | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ITT IDL | 7.0 | ITT's Interactive Data Language | www.ittvis.com | IDL is a data processing language that when combined with VAPOR provides a powerful environment for qualitative and quantitative data exploration |
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.
The instructions below describes the process for building and installing VAPOR on UNIX and Mac platforms.
Note: it is strongly recommended that the binary installation be used if at all possible. Building from source can be difficult and time consuming. |
Note to Mac users: the instructions below will not generate a Mac Application (.app file): the resulting vaporgui executable must be invoked from the command line.
After resolving any of VAPOR library dependencies, you are ready to begin the build process. If you haven't done so already, download the source tar file. After downloading, uncompress and unpack the tar file, and then change working directories to the VAPOR source directory by using the following commands or their equivalents:
gunzip vapor-x.x.x-src.tar.gz
tar xf vapor-x.x.x-src.tar
cd vapor-x.x.x-src
where 'x.x.x' is the VAPOR version number.
The first step in the compilation process is to edit the top-level options.mk file. This file contains gmake Makefile macros that are used to inform the build system of the locations of various 3rd party packages, and also allows you to configure various optional components. In particular, the macros with "PATH" suffixes will in most cases need to be defined to point to the locations of various library and header file paths. Other macros of interest are the INSTALL_PREFIX and macros with the "IDL" prefix, which tell the build system where to install VAPOR, and control whether IDL support routines are generated, respectively. The most up-to-date, and complete descriptions of these and other variables are found as comments in the options.mk file itself.
Once the VAPOR installation system has been configured, you may compile by simply typing:
gmake
or possibly just
make
if your version of make is gmake compilant. The build process takes anywhere from a few minutes to a half an hour. After compiling the software, executable and libraries may be installed by executing
gmake install
Executables, libraries, and header files will be installed to the installation target directory defined previously in the configuration step.
The VAPOR suite of applications relies on a number of shared libraries. Users will be required to execute a configuration script prior to running any VAPOR commands. The script vapor_home/bin/vapor-setup.sh should be sourced by all users before starting a VAPOR session, where vapor_home is the value of the INSTALL_PREFIX_DIR macro found in the options.mk file used to configure vapor. For convenience it is advised that users place this command in their login script (.login for C shell or .profile for other shells). Once the variables are set in the login script, there is no need to run the environment script files for each session.
C-shell derivative users (csh, tcsh) If you are a C-shell (csh, tcsh) user you must execute the following command prior to running any VAPOR utilities:
source vapor_home/bin/vapor-setup.csh
where vapor_home is the root of the installation directory for VAPOR. Bourne shell derivative users (ksh, bash, sh) If you are a Bourne shell (sh, bash, ksh) user you must execute the following command prior to running any VAPOR utilities:
. vapor_home/bin/vapor-setup.sh
where vapor_home is the root of the installation directory for VAPOR. Note the "." is the bourne shell command for sourcing a file. |
Note that currently, on Windows, only the Microsoft Visual Studio build is supported. Also, this builds a 32-bit image; VAPOR has not yet been ported to 64-bit Windows. Send e-mail to vapor@ucar.edu if you have questions or problems with the Windows source build.
Note: it is strongly recommended that the binary installation be used if at all possible. Building from source can be difficult and time consuming. |
Microsoft Visual C++ .NET 2003 or later is required.
Windows versions of the following libraries and header files must be installed.
Note: LibTiff, LibGeotiff, and PROJ are statically linked on windows. The versions of the libraries and header files that were used to build VAPOR 1.5 are available on the VAPOR website as proj4_win32.zip (containing proj libraries and headers) and tiff_win32.zip (containing headers and libraries for both tiff and geotiff).
The VAPOR source download file is the same for Windows and Linux. On Windows, it’s necessary to have the programs "gunzip" and "tar" on the Windows machine. These programs can be obtained from the http://www.cygwin.com website. To convert the source download file to the full source code, first run 'gunzip vapor-1.4.0-src.tar.gz' and then run 'tar -xf vapor-1.3.2-src.tar'
Set the following environment variables:
Load the Visual C++ solution file from its directory in the source tree (make/win32/common/common.sln ) into visual C++, and build the entire solution.
Note: In order to build the Windows installer project, it will be necessary to specify the paths (on your local machine) to many of the files that are included in the installation, such as the QT library dll. The windows installer does not use environment variables to determine the libraries to install.
