Installation Introduction

Installation Guide

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 Guide.

A shell script (Configure) is provided to facilitate the installation procedure, and to help the user set up the environment correctly.

1.1 Supported Computers and Operating Systems

Geant4 is supported under the following operating systems:

Linux on PC with g++ (gcc compiler)
Flavors of Unix (from vendors: SUN)
Windows/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:

    Linux   - Scientific Linux CERN, SLC3 or SLC4
              g++ gcc 3.2.3 or 3.4.5                 G4SYSTEM: Linux-g++
    UNIX    - SUN-SunOS v.5.8, CC Forte Developer 7
              C++ 5.4 Patch 111715-05                G4SYSTEM: SUN-CC
    Windows - Windows XP and Cygwin32,
              MSVC++ 7.1 .NET                        G4SYSTEM: WIN32-VC

For a more detailed description of supported platforms/compilers 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)
GNU Make (note: g++ preprocessing is used to build file dependencies) is also used and a UNIX shell
The Geant4 toolkit source code

1.3 Visualization Software

The above list of software is the minimum required 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 (free software from SGI)
Open Scientist (Interactive environment, including GUI)
WIRED3 HepRep Browser (HepRep Browser)
WIRED4 JAS Plug-In (HepRep Browser)
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, AIDA-compliant packages which provide the necessary functionalities for doing histogramming (and therefore, should be optionally installed) are:

JAS (Java Analysis Studio)
PI (AIDA Interactive Analysis Environment)
Open Scientist (Interactive Analysis Environment) .

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