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Installing Netgen from source on Ubuntu 10.4 (or Debian 6.0 Squeeze)

In this example we do everything inside the directory ~/src (~ is a common shell convention to refer to your home directory, it is typically expanded to something like /home/yourusername). You can create the directory with:

cd ~
mkdir src # create the directory, in case it does not exist, yet

Requirements

You will need to install a number of packages in order to compile Netgen correctly. You can do it with just one line from your shell:

sudo aptitude install tcl-dev tk-dev tix-dev libxmu-dev

Notice that you will need administrator priviledges in order to do that.
You may need to also install libglut-dev and g++ (at least on a clean Debian 6.0 Squeeze installation).

Installing Togl from sources

There is a further requirement which is not available in the Ubuntu repositories. You'll then have to install it by hand. First let's download the package:

cd ~/src
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/togl/files/Togl/1.7/Togl-1.7.tar.gz/download
tar xzvf Togl-1.7.tar.gz

Now enter the directory, configure, compile and install.

cd ~/src/Togl-1.7
./configure
make
sudo make install

The last command will require to enter your password (and require you to be an administrator). If everything went as it should, typing the command ls /usr/lib/Togl-1.7 should produce the following output:

libTogl1.7.so  pkgIndex.tcl

Installing Netgen from sources

Download the latest Netgen tarball and unpack it under the ~/src directory.

cd ~/src
wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/project/netgen-mesher/netgen-mesher/4.9.13/netgen-4.9.13.zip
unzip netgen-4.9.13
cd netgen-4.9.13

Configure, compile and install it:

./configure
make
sudo make install

That will create a directory under /opt. Now get back to the ~/src directory and download a file like this:

cd ~/src
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1820549/soton/netgen

The file should have the following content:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/Togl1.7
export NETGENDIR=/opt/netgen/bin
/opt/netgen/bin/netgen "$@"

Copy the file in the /usr/bin directory and adjust the permissions with the following two commands:

sudo cp netgen /usr/bin
sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/netgen

You should now be able to launch Netgen from the command line:

you@machine:~$ netgen &
[1] 15400
you@machine:~$ NETGEN-4.9.13
Developed at RWTH Aachen University, Germany
and Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Parsing ng.tcl                                                                                
optfile ./ng.opt does not exist - using default values

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