To: software-announce@MIT.EDU
Cc: facdev@MIT.EDU, cfyi@MIT.EDU, manoli@MIT.EDU
Subject: Geomview installed on Athena
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 18:20:22 EST
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>


I have installed a freely distributable 3d graphics image viewer
called Geomview on Athena, for Sun, SGI and Linux/NetBSD platforms.

Geomview comes from the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota
and comes with a number of add-on modules, including Wulffman and measure,
which specialize in crystallography.

To run it, do "add geomview" followed by "geomview" on an Athena Sun,
SGI Indy, Linux or NetBSD machine. There is HTML documentation in
/mit/geomview_v1.6.1/www and man pages below /mit/geomview_v1.6.1/man,
plus various READMEs in /mit/geomview_v1.6.1/distrib/Geomview and
/mit/geomview_v1.6.1/distrib/Geomview/doc.

It can also interface to Maple (R3 but not R4) and Mathematica, and I have 
added some links and .m files to the relevant Maple and Mathematica lockers
to allow this. For info on how to use these see files

/mit/geomview_v1.6.1/distrib/share/maple/README.gvplot and
/mit/geomview_v1.6.1/distrib/share/doc/OOGL.m.doc repectively.

The following command sequences should get you started:

Maple (R3 only- do "add maple_v5r3"):

readlib(gvplot);
fig := plot3d((1.3)^x*sin(y),x=-1..2*Pi,y=0..Pi,coords=spherical,style=patch);
gvplot(fig);

Mathematica:

<<Geomview.m
Plot3D[x^2 + y^2, {x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}]

Things are already configured so that the only steps you need to take
are 1. the maple or mathematica command to generate the 3d image and
2. the special command to launch Geomview. You should not need to add
or attach the geomview locker when launching it from maple or
mathematica in this way.

The maple version won't work until the next AFS propagation (and there
may still be a problem with Linux but Sun and SGI should be OK).

Some of the add-on modules won't work because we don't have Tcl/Tk libraries
installed at the moment, and you may see error messages like "can't load
libtk.so.1" if you try to run them. 

There are also relevant URLs at:

http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/download/geomview.html
http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~ryan/wulffman/
http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~ryan/measure/

Installation/configuration problems should be reported directly to me.

                                           Alex