[Radiance-general] Installing Radiance in Ubuntu

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 7 Jul 2008, at 23:10, Nick Calcagni wrote:

> Basically, after typing in "sudo apt-get install radiance" what do  
> I type
> next in order to open Radiance? (so I can start inputting the  
> scenes from
> the "Rendering With Radiance" tutorial).

Here's a bit of copy+past from a recent message (regular readers
might have a deja-vu experience here):

First you have to get an idea about what Radiance is. I'd recommend
to read and follow the documents linked on this page:

	http://luminance.londonmet.ac.uk/learnix/docs.shtml

This should give you a good understanding of the basic interaction  
between
the Radiance tools. Further you can download a lot of e-papers from

	http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/framer.html

Some of these documents are a bit dated but the principles have not  
changed.

That should keep you busy for a while.


Further notes on Ubuntu/Linux:

If you're new to Linux/Unix you have to become familiar with the command
line and a friendly text editor of your choice. There're a lot of  
books available
that will make you an Unix guru in 7 days for $9.95. Just pick one.

On Ubuntu (or Debian etc) you should check /usr/share/doc/radiance
or where ever the distribution stores the docs. In particular search for
the notes about renaming of applications (genbox -> genrbox in  
particular)
or you won't have much fun with the old tutorials. Radiance comes with
a bunch of PDFs and text files which are worth reading.

Then read the man pages for the most interesting apps:
rad, rpict, rtrace, oconv, ximage, rvu. They contain examples of  
their use
and all together should give you an idea about how things are supposed
to work.

Regards,
Thomas