Installation and Downloads
The simplest way to get started is just to download our latest official releases
Supported: Ubuntu, Ubuntu(64 Bit) Experimental: Mac
Unzip the file to a convenient location for yourself,and double click the program that you wish to run.
- Download and install the free VirtualBox on your host computer, which can be any Intel-based Mac, Windows PC, or Linux box.
- Download the VM image 32-bit 64-bit (~8.7 GB zipped)
- Run VirtualBox and click the New button to create a new VM.
- When the VM Wizard appears, select the following options:
- operating system: Linux
- version: Ubuntu
- RAM base memory: at least 1024 MB
- Select "Use existing hard disk" and choose the .vdi file you downloaded in step 2
- The VM's root (administrator) password is biotrack
Power users and those wishing to use our source code to develop on their own will want to compile the programs directly from our source code. In order to do so, you need to make sure that your operating system has the correct libraries and the environment is correctly setup. All of our source code is available here: http://github.com/biotracking/biotrack/
This guide assumes that you are starting with a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04. Here are notes on Installing Ubuntu. If you just go through this entire guide, step-by-step, your installation of Ubuntu will be configured in the same fashion as our development environments and you can get working with Biotracking. For notes on compiling for Mac OS X see here
- If you are super new to Linux, the way to quickly carry out powerful commands is through the "Terminal." You can open the terminal by clicking the large Ubuntu Button at the top left corner of the screen and typing "Terminal." Then, throughout this guide, when you see commands highlighted in boxes like this
ls -a
You can simply copy them into the terminal (NOTE to paste in the terminal you must press CTRL+SHIFT+V) and hit ENTER.
Open In Terminal [optional]
- For users new to Linux and using the terminal for the first time, one of the biggest difficulties can be navigating to the correct folder location. Typing in this command will let you open a new terminal by right clicking in whatever folder you are currently working inside.
sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal
VirtualBox Adjustments [optional]
- If you are using VirtualBox to run Ubuntu, sometimes the display runs at a very low resolution which can be cumbersome. You need to go to VirtualBox's Menu option Devices and select Install Guest Additions:
Devices>Install Guest Additions
Agree to whatever warnings occur, and then restart VirtualBox. Now when you go to adjust display settings, you can choose a higher resolution for your virtual monitor.
Cmake-Gui [totally]
- This is a handy graphical tool for configuring how libraries are made
sudo apt-get install cmake-qt-gui
Update
First we want to make sure that all your components are updated
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
GIT Let's you retreive latest versioned downloads of source code from Github
sudo apt-get install git
SVN Let's you retreive latest versioned downloads of source code
sudo apt-get install subversion
Codecs
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10
BioTrack GIT
- This downloads the latest version of our software to your desktop
sudo apt-get install git cd ~/Desktop git clone https://github.com/biotracking/biotrack.git
sudo apt-get install qtcreator
This is based off the tutorial which you can follow in more detail here: Samontab Tutorial
First get all the dependencies
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff4-dev libjasper-dev libopenexr-dev cmake python-dev python-numpy python-tk libtbb-dev libeigen2-dev yasm libfaac-dev \ libopencore-amrnb-dev libopencore-amrwb-dev libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev libxvidcore-dev libx264-dev libqt4-dev libqt4-opengl-dev sphinx-common texlive-latex-extra libv4l-dev \ libdc1394-22-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev
Then get the actual OpenCV code
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/opencvlibrary/opencv-unix/2.4.2/OpenCV-2.4.2.tar.bz2 tar -xvf OpenCV-2.4.2.tar.bz2 cd OpenCV-2.4.2
mkdir build cd build cmake -D WITH_TBB=ON -D BUILD_NEW_PYTHON_SUPPORT=ON -D WITH_V4L=ON -D INSTALL_C_EXAMPLES=ON -D INSTALL_PYTHON_EXAMPLES=ON -D BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON -D WITH_QT=ON -D WITH_OPENGL=ON ..
Make sure that the output of that last command does not say "error" anywhere, and that the line "FFMPEG:" says "YES"
make sudo make install
Now we have to configure OpenCV so that our programs know how to access these libraries
sudo gedit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/opencv.conf
When this file opens, type in this line at the end of the file
- "/usr/local/lib"
(it may be an empty file, but that's ok) and save it
Run this in the terminal
sudo ldconfig
Now we have to edit one more file
sudo gedit /etc/bash.bashrc
Add these two lines at the end of the file and save it
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
This library is traditionally used in robotics for reconstructing environments and detecting shapes using 3D data. We have engineered parts of this library to perform optimized 2D tracking within MultiTrack.
First we do a binary install because it also quickly adds all the dependencies (like Eigen3, FLANN, Boost...) necessary to run PCL
Install all PCL dependencies
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:v-launchpad-jochen-sprickerhof-de/pcl sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libpcl-all
After all this configuring, your programs will only compile and run after you restart the entire system.
Ignore this section if you simply want to run and use the BioTrack Pack. If you want to optomize your system for actually developing, however, it can be helpful to perform a couple additional commands
sudo apt-get install phonon-backend-gstreamer
sudo apt-get install qt-sdk
Maybe also
sudo apt-get install libqt4-dbg
If you want to Debug one of the projects, make sure that the
Statically compiling a project that uses many independent libraries can be prohibitively tricky. There can also be weird legal problems with building other libraries into your binary if they are not GPL'ed. Instead we found a simpler method for sharing a binary and its dependencies in one neat little package.
- First build a normal release binary as if you were just normally developing
- Next go into this release directory and run this command. It will copy every dependency needed by the binary to the folder of your choice!
cp `ldd NAMEOFYOURRELEASE | sed -re s/^.+\=\>// | sed -re 's/^(.+) \(.+\)/\1/'` FOLDERNAMETOPUTLIBRARIES/
- for NAMEOFYOURRELEASE put the name of the executeable binary file that you created,
- and for FOLDERNAMETOPUTLIBRARIES put the name of a folder that you would wish to copy all the dependencies into
- 3. Now we need to tell the executable where to look for the dependencies when it is on a strange new computer.
- Go into your .pro file for your project and add these two lines
QMAKE_LFLAGS += -Wl,--rpath=\\\$\$ORIGIN/FOLDERNAMETOPUTLIBRARIES QMAKE_LFLAGS_RPATH=
Now you should be able to move this binary and its folder of dependencies wherever you want!
All of the information provided above is for installing BioTrack Pack on a computer running Ubuntu 12.04. The easiest way to run our software on a mac is to either download the binaries provided here or download the VirtualBox image, however it is possible to compile our software and all the libraries it depends upon natively for OS X. To do this, you should be comfortable configuring and installing unix software on a mac. For the most part, this involves downloading source packages and running ./configure; make; sudo make install. When specific configuration options are needed they will be mentioned.
- Xcode - available from the app store in the most recent versions of OS X.
- pkg-config - use version 0.25 as newer versions no longer include several large dependencies.
Qt has binaries available here.
- cmake - this should be built from source (I have not tested using the binaries).
- python - mac's now ship with python installed by default.
- yasm - download the source .tar.gz file
-
x264 - the main download button links to the current stable snapshot. If you encounter errors,
x264-snapshot-20120603-2245-stable.tar.bz2
The Point Cloud Library has a page with links for pre-built binaries for many of the pcl library dependencies, but if you want to compile 'everything' from source, the project pages for the respective libraries are linked below.
- boost - tested with version 1.49, newer versions should work
- libusb-devel - tested with version 1.0.8.20101017-2
- flann - tested with version 1.7.1 compiled from source (not using MacPorts)
- eigen - tested with snapshot eigen-eigen-6e7488e20373.tar.bz2
- openni-dev-bin - from this page you need to pick the following options from the drop down menus: OpenNI Binaries; Unstable; OpenNI Unstable Build for MacOSX 10.7