| Installation Guide

1. Installation Introduction

This section describes the global computing environment required for installing the Geant4 toolkit. To set up your specific computing environment for Geant4, refer to Section 2 of this Guide.

A shell script (`Configure`) is provided to facilitate the installation procedure, and to help the user set up the environment correctly.

## 1.1 Supported Computers and Operating Systems

Geant4 is supported under the following operating systems:

- Linux on PC with g++ (gcc compiler)
- Flavors of Unix (from vendors: SUN)
- Windows/XP with MicroSoft Visual C++

Currently, this is the set of flavors which can be associated with the environment variable `$G4SYSTEM` to identify the system architecture and compiler used:

        Linux   - Scientific Linux CERN, SLC3 or SLC4
                  g++ gcc 3.2.3 or 3.4.5                 G4SYSTEM: Linux-g++
        UNIX    - SUN-SunOS v.5.8, CC Forte Developer 7
                  C++ 5.4 Patch 111715-05                G4SYSTEM: SUN-CC
        Windows - Windows XP and Cygwin32,
                  MSVC++ 7.1 .NET                        G4SYSTEM: WIN32-VC

For a more detailed description of supported platforms/compilers and versions of third party software, please refer to the release notes available with the current release you're using in `geant4/ReleaseNotes` (also accessible from the web distribution page).

## 1.2 Required Software

To run Geant4, the following software must be properly installed in your computing environment:

- C++ compiler
  (compiler from Unix vendor, g++ or Visual C++ for Windows systems)
- CLHEP library
  (see CLHEP reference guide cern.ch/clhep/manual/RefGuide)
- GNU Make (note: g++ preprocessing is used to build file dependencies) is also used and a UNIX shell
- The Geant4 toolkit source code

## 1.3 Visualization Software

The above list of software is the minimum required for a non-graphical setup of Geant4. To use visualization graphics in Geant4 and/or a graphical user interface (GUI), at least one of the following graphic systems or packages is required in your computing environment:

- X Windows
- OpenGL or MesaGL (free software compatible with OpenGL)
- DAWN, a PostScript renderer
- Open Inventor (free software from SGI)
- Open Scientist (Interactive environment, including GUI)
- WIRED3 HepRep Browser (HepRep Browser)
- WIRED4 JAS Plug-In (HepRep Browser)
- Momo (a Java-based GUI environment, GGE, GPE, ...)
- VRML browser

Alternatively, you can produce an ascii file for VRML or DAWN.

More information is available in Section 8.6, Visualization Drivers, of the User's Guide for Application Developers.

## 1.4 Software for Analysis and Histogramming

Histogramming facilities are provided through the AIDA abstract interface, which in this case needs to be installed as well:

- AIDA (Abstract Interfaces for Data Analysis)

External, AIDA-compliant packages which provide the necessary functionalities for doing histogramming (and therefore, should be optionally installed) are:

- JAS (Java Analysis Studio)
- PI (AIDA Interactive Analysis Environment)
- Open Scientist (Interactive Analysis Environment) .

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