Install VisIt on Linux

[Friedrih]

Good day.
I unziped visit-develop.zip. What i should do next to install VisIt?

[biagas]

To install VisIt you should download one of the release binary tarballs and follow the instructions on Installing Visit.

These instructions also tell you where to find the release tarballs.

[JustinPrivitera]

Oh my. Are all of these created by build_visit? build_visit should tell you what directory it is writing the third party libraries to. You should figure out which one it is writing to and delete it. Or delete all of the third party directories, assuming they were created at some point while trying to build/install VisIt.

[Friedrih]

I left the visit-develop and Visit folders.

I took the visit_install file from the visit-develop folder, moving it to /home/erg.

[JustinPrivitera]

Ok. So what happens now?

[Friedrih]

/home/erg/visit/bin/visit

The terminal still showing only: "Running: gui3.4.1"

[JustinPrivitera]

I will be investigating the ubuntu install early next week.

[JustinPrivitera]

I have recently acquired an ubuntu 24 system; when I return from travel I will go through the installation steps there and hopefully be able to help you more.

[JustinPrivitera]

Hello @Friedrih. I promised you I would install VisIt on an Ubuntu24 system. I have done so and here are the steps I took:

1. Download visit_install.
2. Download the ubuntu 22 tarball (it works on ubuntu 24).
3. Run the following commands in the directory where you downloaded the files. These commands are mostly from here.

chmod +x visit-install3_4_1
mv visit3_4_1.linux-x86_64-ubuntu22.tar.gz visit3_4_1.linux-x86_64.tar.gz
sudo ./visit-install3_4_1 3.4.1 linux-x86_64 /usr/local/visit

Once complete, run /usr/local/visit/bin/visit to run VisIt.

I think we are in the weeds with what we've been trying. To install VisIt, you shouldn't need to use build_visit to build the third party libraries. All you should need are the two files I linked up above. If you want to build VisIt from sources, then that is a different process which we can help you with.

I would make sure you've deleted whatever is in /usr/local/visit, or wherever you want to install VisIt to, and then try again with the commands I listed. Let me know if you run into issues.

[Friedrih]

As another troubleshooting step, can you run glxgears or xeyes?

They are both working

[Shajjar98]

Hello I am having the exact same problem. I started by downloading the installer and cooresponding tar.gz file, however it did not work. I tried visit_install following the instructions on github. When that didn't work I tried ./build_visit3_3_3 --required --hdf5 --silo --makeflags -j4 (I need VisIt to read Silo files). This returned a python error
build_visit3_4_1_log.txt.
I then deleted all corresponding Visit files and replicated the steps @JustinPrivitera mentioned. It returns Running: gui3.4.1 but then nothing happens. For further clarification I am using a Windows 11 PC running a VM on Oracle VirtualBox (Ubuntu 24.04.01)

[JustinPrivitera]

Alternatively you could look at installing directly on Windows.

More discussion on this issue has taken place here: #20094

Can you run glxgears or xeyes? What is the output of uname -m? Or, put another way, is your system x86_64?

[Shajjar98]

Thanks for the response, I appreciate the help. Unfortunately I need it on ubuntu as I am running Parflow and would like to visualize output in the same machine. Both glxgears or xeyes work normally. As for the uname -m, it returns x86_64

[JustinPrivitera]

Please see #20094 for more troubleshooting steps. @biagas has outlined several more approaches you may try there.

[jose-d]

Hey @Friedrih ;

coincidentally I am just now helping to one of my $USER with running visit at our EL8-based system. (and reading discussions here to realize what happened in past months here)

If there is apptainer (https://apptainer.org/) available for your system, feel free to use our recipe:

https://github.com/jose-d/visit-apptainer

cheers

josef