Running MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) on Windows
August, 2008
MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) can run on Windows by utilizing Cygwin and the appropriate dependencies. 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.
Install 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.