MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) on Cygwin

MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) on Cygwin
how to run MPB on windows
-Robert Hovden, Jul 30 2008

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This is a quick rundown / summary of what I did to compile and install MPB using Cygwin on my Windows Vista machine. There are many dependencies and libraries that are needed to get MPB up and running. It is not comprehensive but at the very least, this should save you some time.

Installing Cygwin

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows which can be used to run software written for Linux distributions. After downloading Cygwin and running setup.exe you will be prompted with a couple hundred optional packages to install. You will need many of these packages to run MPB, let’s go through what dependencies can be installed using setup.exe.

gcc : C compiler
> Devel
gcc-g++: C++ compiler
> Devel
gcc-g77: Fortran compiler
> Devel
gettext: GNU Internationalization development utilities
> Devel
guile: The GNU extension language and Scheme interpreter – executables
> Interpreters
guile-devel: The GNU extension language and Scheme interpreter – development
> Libs
hdf5: HDF5 Hierarchical Data Format
> Utils
lapack: Comprehensive FORTRAN library for linear algebra operations.
> Math
libhdf5-devel: HDF5 Hierarchical Data Format – (development)
> Utils
libgmp-devel: Development library for GMP arbitrary precision arithmetic library
> Libs
libiconv: GNU character set conversion library and utilities
> Libs
libtool: A shared library generation tool
> Devel
make: The GNU version of the ‘make’ utility
> Devel
 

FFTW 2.1.5

FFTW version 3 is available through the cygwin setup but you will need version 2 which must be downloaded and compiled. Versions 2 and 3 will not conflict if both are simultaneously installed on your machine.

LIBCTL

Libctl is written by the authors of MPB and it can be found on their website. This must be compiled and installed.

MPB

With all of the above dependencies you should have enough to compile, install, and run MPB. Note that in order to install MPB using Windows Vista you will have to run cygwin as an administrator.