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10.1 Installing the Unix Binary Distribution

If you have just obtained a copy of the binary distribution for a Unix system (Linux, SGI, Solaris, HP, etc), you should be able to run Geomview and make use of most of its features immediately after unpacking it by cd'ing to the directory that it is in and typing geomview.

In order to fully install Geomview so that you can run it from any directory and use all of its features, follow the steps in this section. In particular, you must go through this installation procedure in order to use Geomview to display Mathematica graphics.

Geomview is distributed in a directory that contains various files and subdirectories that Geomview needs at run-time, such as data files and external modules. It also contains other things distributed with Geomview, such as documentation and (in the soure-code distribution) source-code. We refer to the root directory of this tree as the $GEOMROOT directory. This is the directory called Geomview that is created when you unpack the distribution file.

To install Geomview on your system, arrange for the $GEOMROOT directory to be in a permanent place. Then, in a shell window, cd to that directory and type install. This runs a shell script which does the installation after asking you several questions about where you want to install the various components of Geomview.

After running the install script you should now be able to run Geomview from any directory on your system. (You may need to give the rehash command in any shells on your computer that were started up before you did the installation.)

The install script puts copies of the files in $GEOMROOT/bin/<CPU> and $GEOMROOT/man into the directories you specified for executables and man pages, respectively. Once you have done the installation you can cut down one the disk space required by Geomview by removing some files from these directories, since copies have been installed elsewhere. You should first test that your installed Geomview works properly because once you remove these files from their distribution directories you will not be able to do the installation again.

In particular, the files you can remove are

$GEOMROOT/bin/<MACHTYPE>:
(where <MACHTYPE> is the type of system you are on, e.g. linux, sgi, hpux, etc). Remove all files from here except gvx, which is the geomview executable file. DO NOT REMOVE gvx. It is not installed elsewhere.
$GEOMROOT/man:
You can remove all the files in this directory.