Building the VTP Libraries and Applications under Unix
(including Linux, BSD, Irix, Mac OS X...)

1. Acquire the Source

Source code (1.6 MB zip file)
Source code documentation (1.3 MB zip file), or you can browse the same documentation directly online for the vtdata and vtlib libraries.

Alternately, you can get the very latest VTP source from SVN.

2. Install and Build

You should refer to the General Unix Build Instructions, but you may find some useful platform-specific help in the following pages, some of which may be dated:

• If you are using Mac OSX, see Pete Willemsen's How to get VTP running on Mac OS X
• If you are using Debian, see Mike Weiblen's Building VTP on GNU/Linux
• For a Debian-specific source distro, you can try Gürkan Sengün's  http://gnu.ethz.ch/debian/vterrain/

3. Download Application Data

vtp-apps-data.zip (7.5 MB) (required) contains basic data for the main applications, includes a world map for use by VTBuilder, and earth image, plant images, road textures, etc. for Enviro.

Enviro-demo.zip (32.4 MB) (optional) contains large demo data for Enviro - including elevation and satellite imagery for several areas including Hawai`i.  You don't need this if you are only going to use your own geospatial data.

4. Run!

You will find documentation for each application in the Docs folder under each directory, and also online.

See the FAQ and status pages for bug reports, feature requests, etc.

Try the software on your own geospatial data!

Send feedback to myself or the VTP mailing list, or the vtp-unix mailing list for anything specific to Unix/Linux/MacOSX.

Development Notes

The changes for porting from Win32 to Unix/Linux largely consists of:

1. creating Makefiles that correspond to the .vcproj files
2. small C++ syntax changes for gcc vs. MSVC
3. byte-swapping for non-Intel CPUs (e.g. Irix on MIPS)
4. changes to the wxWindows GUI code regarding resources
5. Win32 .ico files are used for icons, these are convertible to X-Windows .xpm (see Porting wxWindows Icons from Windows to Linux/GTK+)

Randall Hopper did a great deal of the original porting work.  Thanks also to Darren Vengroff, Stephan Heigl, Norman Vine, and Mike Weiblen, and all the authors of the portable libraries on which the VTP depends.

TODO

1. The Enviro GUI does not function properly on many Unix windows systems - the toolbars and menu highlighting is incorrect, and the program does not close correctly.  Need to look into why, and whether this can be addressed.  Perhaps it has improved since the move to wxWidgets 2.6.x.
2. A few more areas need support for big-endian CPUs, which should only be an issue for people running e.g. Irix on SGI MIPS machines.