MISCELANEOUS TECHNICAL QUESTIONS FOR Open Inventor (TM) Open Source Release. What platforms does it run on? This release was built and has been tested with Red HatTM Linux® versions 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2 on a variety of Intel® Pentium II® based systems including the SGI® 230, 330, 550 workstation with VPROTM graphics accelerator. It is also known to run with several other Linux distributions on IA32-based hardware. What are the dependencies for this release? The libraries and sample programs built for this release have dependencies upon the following DSO's. For your convenience their corresponding package name from the system which built the images is included below. Many of the packages are included in Red Hat 6.0 or 6.1: ld-linux.so.2 [glibc-2.1.1-6] libdl.so.2 [glibc-2.1.1-6] libm.so.6 [glibc-2.1.1-6] libc.so.6 [glibc-2.1.1-6] libICE.so.6 [XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49] libSM.so.6 [XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49] libX11.so.6: [XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49] libXext.so.6 [XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49] libXmu.so.6 [XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49] libXt.so.6 [XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49] libXi.so.6 [XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49] libGL.so.1 [Mesa-3.2-1] libGLU.so.1 [Mesa-3.2-1] libXm.so.1 [lesstif-0.90.0-1] Where can I get OpenGL? OpenGL® is now available from many sources. Certain vendors (such as SGI) pre-bundle accelerated OpenGL drivers with their systems; some (nVidia, et al) have accelerated drivers available on their web sites; and other vendors (3dfx, Matrox, ATI, etc) use drivers created by the DRI Project or the Utah-GLX Project. Which implementation of OpenGL to choose is ultimately dependent upon the type of graphics card you have. Open Inventor 2.1.5 is compatible with any implementation of OpenGL that conforms to the OpenGL ABI for Linux, such as: SGI 230, SGI 330, and SGI 550 workstations with VPRO graphics are shipped with specially-tuned OpenGL DSO's. NVIDIA-specific drivers compliant with the OpenGL ABI for Linux can be found on the NVIDIA web site. DRI Architecture Drivers. The DRI architecture uses Mesa and provides hardware acceleration for a number of popular chipsets. The DRI implementation is included in XFree86 4.0. See 'Where can I get XFree86?' below. OpenGL Sample Implementation is the driver framework used by almost all commercial 3D hardware vendors to develop OpenGL drivers for their systems. Source code is available from the SGI Open Source web site. Mesa is a 3D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL. Mesa 3.2 includes OpenGL ABI for Linux compliant DSO's. See 'Where can I get Mesa?' below. More links to various vendors' OpenGL implementations are available from these sites (subject to change): http://www.mesa3d.org http://www.linux3d.org http://linux3d.netpedia.net If you are unable to find accelerated OpenGL drivers for your card, or have problems using the vendor-provided accelerated drivers, we recommend using Mesa 3.2 or the OpenGL sample implementation. Where can I get Mesa? Mesa is a 3D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL®. For general information about Mesa please refer to the Mesa web site, http://www.mesa3d.org. Special Note: Official Mesa releases prior to version 3.2 were not compliant with the OpenGL ABI for Linux. If you are using Mesa you must upgrade to Mesa 3.2, or you may encounter dependency problems when installing via rpm. Where can I get Motif® or Lesstif? If you do not have Motif already installed on your system, Lesstif will work just fine with Open Inventor. For general information about Lesstif please refer to the Lesstif web site, http://www.lesstif.org. Links to pre-compiled binaries of Lesstif can be found at ftp://contrib.redhat.com or one of the many Red Hat contrib mirror sites, typically under contrib/libc6/i386/. How do I install this release? 1.Check to see that you have the software listed above as dependencies already installed on your system. 2.Download all three Open Inventor rpm files from the download site into a temporary location on your system. (for example, /usr/tmp) 3.Log in as root. 4.In a shell window, type: rpm -Uvh /usr/tmp/sgi-OpenInventor*.rpm (Replace /usr/tmp with the location where you downloaded the files) Refer to the rpm(1) manual page for more information about the rpm tool. What do these rpms install? sgi-OpenInventor installs the execution-only-environment, which contains the Open Inventor run-time libraries under /usr/lib: libInventor.so, libInventorXt.so, libFL.a. sgi-OpenInventor-data installs a number of example model files under /usr/share/data/models. sgi-OpenInventor-devel installs the full Open Inventor development environment. It includes header files in /usr/include/Inventor and manual pages in /usr/man/man3. What should I do to run it? Open Inventor is an Application Programming Interface that you would typically utilize in your own program. However, there are some sample programs in the distribution. After installing the images, open a shell window and type the following: ivview /usr/share/data/models/SgiLogo.iv or ivview /usr/share/data/models/buildings/windmill.iv