[Radiance-general] trouble in installing radiance on ubuntu 8.03-a new user

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 15 Jun 2008, at 06:01, ZZ wrote:

> I tried to install radiance according to your instruction, and it  
> should work by my computer's feedback information.
>
> (i) I perform install in the directory"/home/myname", is  
> it ok? I'm not sure if I
> should perform "sudo apt-get install radiance" in the directory "root"

The location where you perform this command does not matter. You just
need the rights to do it, hence the use of sudo.

> (ii) it is strange that after intallion I can't findany installed  
> files of radiance.

It's Debian/Ubuntu policy to install everything in the /usr branch of  
the file system.
The binaries will be in /usr/bin/, library files in /usr/lib or a  
subdirectory of it.
The advantage is that everything is in your search path after  
installation
so you won't have to adjust PATH yourself.

The disadvantage is that there will be name conflicts with other  
packages.
For the Debian/Ubuntu packages in particular the name of the 'genbox'
program was changed to 'rgenbox'. If you want to follow the examples in
old documents you have to keep that in mind and change the commands
accordingly.

Another frequently used command is 'rview'. It was renamed to 'rvu' a  
while
ago but there are still plenty of examples and tutorials around which  
use the
old name.

> (iii) should I set environment path after installion?

As said above you won't have to set PATH if everything is in /usr/bin/.
You can check if there is a RAYPATH variable set after you log in.
Type

	env | grep RAYPATH

and you should see the value of the variable (or nothing if it's not  
set).
Strictly speaking RAYPATH is not necessary if you're not referring to
any patterns or calculation files in your scene. Some example scene
do, however, so it's probably a good idea to have it set.

> (iv) how to get first start of radiance in ubuntu?

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.

Regards,
Thomas