This page describes how Met.3D can be compiled from its source code using conda under Linux. If you would like to simply use the software, please use the precompiled binary package instead. If you would like to use a specific branch, or change parts of the source code yourself, this page is for you.
You require an OpenGL 4.3 (or higher) capable graphics card and an appropriate Linux driver to run Met.3D. The driver will most likely be a proprietary driver (we've only tested Nvidia so far); open-source drivers for Linux currently do not provide the required capabilities. Before you continue with the installation, make sure that graphics card and driver are installed. If everything is installed correctly, the glxinfo command should output something similar to (the important thing is the OpenGL core profile version > 4.3):
# glxinfo | grep OpenGL OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GTX TITAN/PCIe/SSE2 OpenGL core profile version string: 4.4.0 NVIDIA 340.96 OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.40 NVIDIA via Cg compiler |
Note: So far we've only been able to test Nvidia drivers. Met.3D uses an Nvidia-specific OpenGL extension that queries the available GPU memory. If you are using a different driver and get an error message stating "GPU memory limit: 0 kb" then your driver unfortunately won't work at the moment. However, since Met.3D is meant to be an open-source community project: If you are a programmer and would like to help resolve this issue, please let us know!
Our recommended approach to compile Met.3D from source and/or to set up a development environment under Linux is using conda. The conda system provides package management that is independent from your Linux system and safely keeps all packages in an environment. This way, everything you install for Met.3D will not interfere with your base system. Also, using conda is independent of your Linux distribution, hence the described approach should work with any Linux distribution and version.
The installation procedure described here works for Met.3D 1.7 and higher versions (note that it does not work for the 1.6 and earlier versions).
Most dependencies for Met.3D are available as conda packages. After you have created a new conda environment for Met.3D (Step 1), you need to install these dependencies (Step 2). Some dependencies are not (yet) available via conda and need to be installed from source (Step 3). Once this is completed, Met.3D sources can be checked out from the git repository and be compiled (Step 4).
If you haven't done so yet, you need to install conda first. Here, we use the miniconda distribution. We recommend to install miniconda into a directory that provides enough disk space (default is in you home directory, you may want to use a different directory).
wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh chmod +x Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh ./Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh |
conda create -n met3d conda activate met3d |
Note: The following installation command may take a while, since all packages need to be downloaded and installed.
conda install -c conda-forge cxx-compiler fortran-compiler make cmake pkg-config gdb glew log4cplus libgdal eccodes netcdf-cxx4 freetype gsl proj qt git mesa-libgl-devel-cos7-x86_64 mesa-dri-drivers-cos7-aarch64 libxau-devel-cos7-aarch64 libselinux-devel-cos7-aarch64 libxdamage-devel-cos7-aarch64 libxxf86vm-devel-cos7-aarch64 libxext-devel-cos7-aarch64 xorg-libxfixes xorg-libxau |
conda install -c conda-forge python pybind11 eigen |
# Create a "met.3d-base" directory in your home directory, with sub-dirs "local" and "third-party". cd ~ mkdir met.3d-base && cd met.3d-base mkdir local mkdir third-party # Checkout and install glfx. cd ~/met.3d-base/third-party/ git clone https://github.com/maizensh/glfx.git cd glfx cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=~/met.3d-base/local CMakeLists.txt make -j 12 make install # Download and install QCustomPlot (download packages from website): cd ~/met.3d-base/third-party/ wget https://www.qcustomplot.com/release/2.1.0fixed/QCustomPlot.tar.gz wget https://www.qcustomplot.com/release/2.1.0fixed/QCustomPlot-sharedlib.tar.gz tar xvfz QCustomPlot.tar.gz tar xvfz QCustomPlot-sharedlib.tar.gz mv qcustomplot-sharedlib/ qcustomplot/ cd qcustomplot/qcustomplot-sharedlib/sharedlib-compilation/ qmake make -j 12 cp libqcustomplot* ~/met.3d-base/local/lib/ cd ../.. cp qcustomplot.h ~/met.3d-base/local/include/ # section C), download remaining third-party dependencies cd ~/met.3d-base/third-party git clone https://github.com/qtproject/qt-solutions.git wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/freefont-ttf-20120503.zip unzip freefont-ttf-20120503.zip mkdir naturalearth cd naturalearth wget https://naciscdn.org/naturalearth/50m/physical/ne_50m_coastline.zip unzip ne_50m_coastline.zip wget https://naciscdn.org/naturalearth/50m/cultural/ne_50m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land.zip unzip ne_50m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land.zip wget https://naciscdn.org/naturalearth/50m/raster/HYP_50M_SR_W.zip unzip HYP_50M_SR_W.zip # section D), download remaining but optional third-party dependencies cd ~/met.3d-base/third-party wget https://zenodo.org/record/5501399/files/ScientificColourMaps7.zip unzip ScientificColourMaps7.zip |
cd ~/met.3d-base/ git clone https://gitlab.com/wxmetvis/met.3d.git mkdir build && cd build cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=~/met.3d-base/local ../met.3d make -j 12 |
# Make sure your "met3d" conda environment is activated! # The Met.3D binary is now located at "~/met.3d-base/build/". To run: cd ~/met.3d-base/build/ MET3D_HOME=~/met.3d-base/met.3d MET3D_BASE=~/met.3d-base ./Met3D |
This section is only relevant if you want to contribute to Met.3D development using the QtCreator IDE.
Unfortunately, there is no conda package for QtCreator, hence the system installation needs to be used (Ubuntu and OpenSuSE provide QtCreator through their package managers). When using the above conda environment for development, you need to make sure that QtCreator sees the correct development paths.