Installation¶

FastSTI is easiest to run in a Posix environment (GNU Linux, FreeBSD, Unix etc), because we develop on Linux. Nevertheless, it isn’t difficult to get it running on a Mac or Windows machine.

Linux etc.¶

1. FastSTI requires a standard C development environment, the GNU Scientific Library and Gnome’s Glib utility library.

On Ubuntu, Debian, Mint etc. this should do the trick:

sudo apt install build-essential libgsl-dev libglib2.0-dev meson

2. Download FastSTI from https://www.simhub.online/media/dist/faststi/faststi-0.2.2.tar.gz and decompress it.

E.g.

wget https://www.simhub.online/media/dist/faststi/faststi-0.2.2.tar.gz; tar xzf faststi-0.2.2.tar.gz

This should create a directory called faststi-0.2.2 which contains the FastSTI files.

Now go to step 3.

Mac¶

Download and decompress this file: https://www.simhub.online/media/dist/faststi/latest.tar.gz

Using Homebrew install the dependencies:

brew install gcc pkg-config glib gsl meson

This should create a directory called faststi-0.2.2 which contains the FastSTI files.

Now go to step 3.

Windows¶

Under Windows you either need to install the Cygwin or MinGW environment, or if you are using Windows 10, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux. But to date we have only tested installation with Cygwin.

Cygwin¶

Use the Cygwin setup tool to install these packages:

gcc-core
make
meson
libgsl-dev
libglib2.0-devel
wget

After installation open the Cygwin terminal and run these steps:

wget https://www.simhub.online/media/dist/faststi/latest.tar.gz
tar xzvf latest.tar.gz

This should create a directory called faststi-0.2.2 which contains the FastSTI files.

Now go to step 3.

On all machines¶

3. Change into the directory that you’ve decompressed the distribution into: faststi-0.2.2

Now use the meson build system:

meson --buildtype release release
cd release
ninja

Then depending on your system either one of these should install the files:
```
sudo ninja install
```

Or:

ninja install

Now test that it works:
```
FSTI_DATA=../data faststi -t
```

This will run the test suite. If everything is properly installed then no failures should be reported.

Note

You may be wondering why we prefix the executable with FSTI_DATA=../data. The FSTI_DATA environment variable simply tells FastSTI where the data files are stored. As you work on FastSTI you may use a different directory for your data files. It’s simply that the default data files are in the data directory.

To uninstall FastSTI simply go into the release directory and run:

sudo ninja uninstall