Requirements for Building NEURON from Sources

Hardware

Disk space

While building you need at least 70MBytes for NEURON and InterViews After installation, you can remove the source and objects and the remaining libraries and executables take up about 20MB.

Memory

neurondemo requires about 9MB.

Software

0: Unix with X11-windows.

For MS-Windows click here. For Mac-OS click here.

1: Yacc or Bison

NEURON comes in two parts. The first part, called nrnoc, consists of everything except the graphical interface and is c source. To build this part you will need either yacc or the gnu version of yacc which is called bison -- or else use the pre-translated files ytab.[ch] If which yacc shows that you have yacc go to step 2. The version of bison I have used in the past is bison-1.25. First see if you have it already installed:
bison +version
will print the version number if bison is in your path. If not then: Download bison-1.25.tar.gz (200KB) and install it. It's pretty straightforward but you should read the installation instructions. On my machine,
	./configure
	make install
suffices but that's because I have permission to write to /usr/local.

If for some reason you do not want to build the graphical interface version of neuron then there is no need to carry out the following steps.

2: C++ compiler

The second part of NEURON is the graphical interface which is written in C++ and makes use of the InterViews graphics library (also written in C++). If you don't have C++ then you can install the gnu version. The earliest version that will compile Interviews is gcc-2.4.5. Before installing it see if you already have it:
gcc -v
and if the version isn't later than 2.4.5 (I am using 2.7.2 then): Download gcc-2.7.2.tar.gz (7MB) and install it. This is less straightforward so take a look at Installing gcc. Here's a shell script that I modify and run when new versions come out that makes the installation particularly simple for my particular environment. The --prefix options are almost certainly unsuitable for you but at least it illustrates the process. You will also need the c++ library. Download libg++-2.7.1.tar.gz (1.6MB), and install it.

3: InterViews

If you have already have a version of interviews installed from my iv3.2a.hines7.tar.Z distibution then that will work with NEURON v4.1. The only substantive difference between the hines7 and newer hines9 version is more efficiency in regexp.c which may make a difference with cvode.netconlist. Versions of interviews prior to hines7 will not work with NEURON v4.1. Download iv3.2a.hines9.tar.Z (3.1MB) and install it . This one may drive you nuts unless you read Installing InterViews. The most common problems are when the x include files and libraries are not in /usr/include/X11 and /usr/lib/X11 respectively. In that case you need to specify the paths explicitly in iv/src/config/InterViews/local.def. The interviews version above can be compiled with gcc2.7.2 which can make shared libraries on a variety of machines including LINUX.