Installing VMC

VMC requires ROOT.

The VMC core package is maintained as a standalone vmc package. Current Geant4 VMC requires this standalone library; ROOT installations with the old embedded VMC enabled are rejected.

VMC uses CMake to configure a build system for compiling and installing the headers, libraries and Cmake configuration files. To install VMC:

  1. First get the VMC source from the Download page. We will assume that the VMC package sits in a subdirectory
/mypath/vmc
  1. Create build directory alongside our source directory
$ cd /mypath
$ mkdir vmc_build
$ ls
 vmc vmc_build
  1. To configure the build, change into the build directory and run CMake:
$ cd /mypath/vmc_build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/mypath/vmc_install /mypath/vmc

  • If ROOT environment was defined using thisroot.{c}sh script, there is no need to provide the path to its installation. Otherwise, they can be provided using -DROOT_DIR cmake option.

  • The VMC core is built by default in RelWithDebInfo build mode (Optimized build with debugging symbols). This default can be changed via the standard CMake option CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE. The other useful values are

    • Release : Optimized build, no debugging symbols
    • Debug : Debugging symbols, no optimization
  1. After the configuration has run, CMake will have generated Unix Makefiles for building VMC. To run the build, simply execute make in the build directory:
$ make -jN

where N is the number of parallel jobs you require (e.g. if your machine has a dual core processor, you could set N to 2).

  • If you need more output to help resolve issues or simply for information, run make as
$ make -jN VERBOSE=1
  1. Once the build has completed, you can install VMC to the directory you specified earlier in CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX by running
$ make install