Building and using TopoVista requires certain software that may not be currently installed on your system. This software is described below.
TopoVista has been built and tested on Linux, Irix, and Macintosh systems. Other systems will probably work, provided that the necessary software is available, but minor configuration changes may be needed.
On an Apple Macintosh, building and running TopoVista is done in Unix fashion, by typing commands in a terminal window. All the necessary software is provided by the “Xcode CD” (formerly the “Developer CD”); this CD accompanies a Mac OS X package but must be separately installed.
TopoVista uses OpenGL and GLUT. This software is included in a full installation of Red Hat Linux. In other environments, you may need to add it.
OpenGL is a software library for rendering graphics. Originally from Silicon Graphics, OpenGL is available from several workstation vendors including SGI, Sun, IBM, and HP. It is also part of many standard Linux distributions. For information on OpenGL, see the OpenGL website.
Mesa, a free clone, can be used as a substitute for OpenGL. Mesa runs on several platforms including Linux. For information on Mesa, see the Mesa website.
The GLUT library, designed for use with OpenGL, provides event and window handling and a framework for using OpenGL. For information on GLUT, see the GLUT page.
Many parts of the TopoVista package are written in Java. TopoVista needs Java 2 version 1.4. On Linux, we use the Java Development Kit distributed for Linux by Sun Microsystems. For SGI and other commercial systems, get Java from the manufacturer.
TopoVista uses the Zlib compression library to read input files in gzip format. If this library is not part of your system, you can find it at the Gzip website.
The tvshow script
uses an image viewer specified by the environment variable TVVIEWER.
The default viewer is the ImageMagick display
viewer, which is distributed with Red Hat Linux.
xv and xloadimage
have also been tested.
Set TVVIEWER to select an alternate viewer.
Two auxiliary scripts
(tvfly and
tvlose) use the
Icon programming language.
Icon is not required unless you wish to use these scripts, which are not
central to the functioning of TopoVista.
Configuration options are set by editing the Makedefs file.
It may be possible to build TopoVista without making any changes. This is the case for Red Hat Linux 9 and SGI Irix 6.5.
For Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3,
change the GLIB definition as indicated in the comments.
Other possibilities are given in the comments.
After verifying prerequisites and making any necessary changes
to the Makedefs file, enter
make
A successful build leaves all the useful end products in the
bin directory.
Add this directory to your search path.
make test
A small set of sample data is provided in the data directory.
Enter one of the following commands to start TopoVista:
bin/topo data/crater/504J309i.tvg data/crater/crater.ppm.gz
bin/topo data/supai/252L6279f.tvg data/supai/trail.fp
bin/topo data/lemmon/503L465h.tvg data/lemmon/lemmon.fp
The first example includes land use coloring.
The other two examples include prepared flight paths;
press the P key in any of the three TopoVista windows
to start the animation.