Trinity College Surface Evolver Workshop


Home

Surface Evolver Installation for Linux

The Surface Evolver executable and associated files for this workshop are on ~brakke/evolver. This directory should be readable by you, but not writable. You may copy the contents of this directory to your own machine, in which case you should make the appropriate adjustments in the instructions below.

You should set up your PATH to find the Evolver executable in /cphys/visitor/brakke/workshop/bin. If you are running the bash shell (the ps command will tell you what you are running), then in ~/.bashrc, add a line

 export PATH=/cphys/visitor/brakke/workshop/bin:$PATH
If you are running tcsh or csh, add a line to ~/.cshrc
 setenv PATH /cphys/visitor/brakke/workshop/bin:$PATH
You should put my directory at the start of your PATH, else you may get an Evolver unrunnable on your machine.

Still in ~/.bashrc or ~/.cshrc, you should set up a new environment variable named EVOLVERPATH:

 export EVOLVERPATH=/cphys/visitor/brakke/workshop/fe:/cphys/visitor/brakke/workshop/doc
or
 setenv EVOLVERPATH /cphys/visitor/brakke/workshop/fe:/cphys/visitor/brakke/workshop/doc
These are directories where Evolver looks for files if it can't find them in the current directory.

You should set up a working directory on your machine for creating your own files and storing files you create with Evolver.

Test by opening a terminal window in your working directory, and run the command evolver quad. You should get a start-up message from Evolver, and a Enter command: prompt, but no graphics yet. To show graphics, use the s command. You should be able to move the surface around by dragging it with the mouse with the left button down. Back in the terminal window, enter q to quit the graphics prompt, q again to quit the surface, and q yet again to quit Evolver.