OpenDA installation for Linux users

Note about csh

At the moment, scripts for csh and related shells are not included with OpenDA. If is possible to use OpenDA in conjunction with for instance tcsh , but you will have to convert the scripts yourself.

Note about GNU C Library

All native components of OpenDA are compiled both for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Linux. For 32 bit systems a GLIBC version 2.4 or higher is needed, for 64 bit version 2.7 or higher. If you have an older version of GLIBC, you have to compile the libraries yourself. It is important that you remove all .so bestanden in the lib-directory before building.

Step-by-step installation

  1. Ensure that Java version 1.6 or higher is installed in your computer. You can check what version is installed with java -version. We have only tested our software with the jre from SUN, with other jre's your mileage may vary. The easiest way to install Java is often with the package manager that comes with your distribution (e.g. APT, yum for Red Hat-, dpkg for Debian- or YaST for SUSE-related distributions).
  2. Download OpenDA from www.openda.org. There is a script available to perform this download: openda_checkout_sf.sh
  3. Extract the OpenDA distribution file to the desired location on your computer. On some Linux systems unzip/ark is not installed by default, in that case try the package manager again.
  4. A number of system variables need to be set before OpenDA can be run. The first variable that should be set is $OPENDADIR. This variable should point to the bin-directory of your OpenDA installation. For example:
    export OPENDADIR=/myhome/openda/bin
    The other variables are set by the script settings_local.sh in the directory $OPENDADIR. This script will try to call the local script with machine specific settings $OPENDADIR/settings_local_<hostname>.sh. You must create this sript yourself.
    Copy the settings_local_base.sh file to a new file named settings_local_<hostname>.sh in your $OPENDADIR (unless that file already exists). You can check your hostname with the hostname command. Then edit that file: enable the relevant lines and change the values of the environment variables.
    For linux there is a default local settings script as well that might work out of the box for your system. You can use this script by
    . $OPENDADIR/settings_local.sh linux
  5. Most convenient is to set the varables automatically. Add in the .bashrc in your home directory, the following two lines:
    export OPENDADIR=<bindir>, with <bindir> the location of the bin directory of your OpenDA installation.
    . $OPENDADIR/setup_openda.sh
    Note that the '.' is significant in the latter of these lines.