povray/unix

Building POV-Ray 3.7 for GNU/Linux and similar systems

This distribution contains the complete source code of POV-Ray for UNIX as well as its accompanying HTML documentation and supporting files. In order to build the distribution supplied in the POV-Ray github repo, you will need to run a pre-build step. This generates the configure script and does a few other things usually performed by our developers prior to releasing a source package.

NB if you have improvements to the below instructions, please add a comment to issue #1, or (if you are working in a branch) send us a pull request.

Generating configure and building the code

% cd unix/
% ./prebuild.sh
% cd ../
% ./configure COMPILED_BY="your name <email@address>" 
% make

Note that the prebuild step will generate a few warnings as it still looks for some files no longer included in v3.7. This is harmless.

Installing

% make install

This above installs POV-Ray under system-wide directories and needs root privileges. Installing as non-privileged user is also possible. By default (i.e. as root), 'make install' installs the following components:

povray binary (executable)              in /usr/local/bin
data files (e.g. includes, scene files) in /usr/local/share/povray-3.7
documentation (text and html)           in /usr/local/share/doc/povray-3.7
configuration files (e.g. povray.conf)  in /usr/local/etc/povray/3.7

The configuration files are also copied under the $HOME/.povray/3.7 directory of the user (or root) who is doing the installation.

Please see unix/install.txt for more details about available configuration options etc.

Dependencies

By default POV-Ray will attempt to build using system-supplied libraries for boost, zlib, libpng, libjpeg, libtiff, and openexr. We recommend you have the following packages pre-installed:

libboost-dev
zlib1g-dev
libpng12-dev
libjpeg8-dev
libtiff5-dev
libopenexr-dev