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.
- Interviews: to build - 62MB; installed - 10MB
- NEURON: to build - 25MB ;libraries and executables - 8MB
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.