Coded by:
Sutton, M.D., Garwood, R.J., Siveter, D.J. & Siveter, D.J. 2012. Spiers and VAXML; A software toolkit for tomographic visualisation, and a format for virtual specimen interchange. Palaeontologia Electronica 15(2): 15.2.5T
CONTENTS:
All SPIERS code is released under the GNU General Public License. See LICENSE.md files in the programme directories.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty.
SPIERS (Serial Palaeontological Image Editing and Rendering System) is a package of three programs for the reconstruction and analysis of tomographic (serial image) datasets, such as those obtained from serial-grinding of specimens, or from CT scanning. More details are available in the documentation for each program.
SPIERS may be compiled using QT from the source code or installed from the binary releases on our GitHub.
We recommend you install and use MSYS2 (64-bit) a Windows package manager, based on modern Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer) and MinGW-w64, that allows easy installation of QT v5.x 64-bit and VTK v8.1.
Install GCC and QT5.X on your system. You can do this two ways, by using system packages:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgl1-mesa-dev
sudo apt install qt5-default
Or by downloading and running the installer from Qt: https://www.qt.io/download Further instructions are available here: https://wiki.qt.io/Install_Qt_5_on_Ubuntu
SPIERSview requires VTK: The Linux version of SPIERSview currently uses VTK7.1. This can also be installed from the Ubuntu packages:
sudo apt-get install libvtk7-qt-dev
Using the above package, you should be able to find the required VTK libraries under /usr/include/vtk-7.1/ They can also be included, if needed, in the working directory, and added to the executable at link time using the QMAKE_RPATHDIR variable - e.g. #QMAKE_RPATHDIR += $$PWD/vtk-7.X/
Download source code, or clone using Git:
git clone https://github.com/palaeoware/SPIERS.git
You can then compile SPIERS by opening the .pro file in QT creator and following standard debug/release procedure (or see alternative below). The resulting executables will be placed in their individual bin folders. SPIERS is set up to work with this directory structure. Copy the build folders to your required location if this differs from the build location.
Alternatively you can build using the following commands - navigate into the SPIERS source folder in a terminal window:
cd SPIERS
Create a makefile:
qmake ./SPIERS.pro
Build by running the make command:
make
You can then copy the build folders to your desired location.
Should you wish to create desktop icons or for SPIERS to appear in your launcher, we provide exemplar desktop entries in the SPIERS/examples folder of the repository, coupled with icons for these. Place the icons in the same folder alongside the executable files, and place this folder wherever you would like it to live on your system. The edit the paths to the executables and icons by replacing XXXXX in the example files with your path. Double clicking on the desktop entry will ask you to trust and launch the program. Placing the entry on your desktop will create an icon that launches the software. Additionally, if you open a terminal at the location where the desktop entry is stored, and copy it from there to /usr/share/applications/ using this command:
sudo cp SPIERSalign.desktop /usr/share/applications/
sudo cp SPIERSedit.desktop /usr/share/applications/
sudo cp SPIERSview.desktop /usr/share/applications/
This will create entries for each package in the GNOME activities overview / launcher. Alternatively you can use alacarte to achieve this process using a GUI:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install alacarte
Install XCode 11 (for Catalina) or XCode 12 (for Big Sur) from Apple App Store.
Install QT5.x/QT Creator from https://www.qt.io/download.
Install Homebrew (https://brew.sh/).
Get VTK 9.1 package via Homebrew - you may need to force Homebrew to install a specific VTK version see Homebrew instruction on how to do so:
brew install vtk
Check/Update the path to the VTK package in the ./SPIERSview/SPIERSview.pro file, where "9.1.0" is your installed version number:
'LIBS += -L/usr/local/Cellar/vtk/9.1.0/lib/'
Note: it may be possible to install QT5.x/QT Creator via Homebrew rather than via the Apple App Store.
Get VTK 8.2 package via Homebrew - you may need to force Homebrew to install a specific VTK version see Homebrew instruction on how to do so:
brew install vtk
On MacOS running on arm64 (M1 chip) homebrew must be installed under x86_64 to work with QT 5.x
Install Homebrew (https://brew.sh/). To do this:
cd ~/Downloads
mkdir homebrew
curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/
master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew`
sudo mv homebrew /usr/local/homebrew
export PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH
alias brew_86='arch -x86_64 /usr/local/homebrew/bin/brew'
If this is not done then homebrew with get installed under arm64 architecture making the VTK libs incompatible with the x86_64 QT compile that is installed by default from the QT binary. QT 6.2 claims to be a universal build (i.e. x86_64 + arm64) but VTK cannot currently be build as a universal library. As such on arm64 MacOS machines we are targeting the Intel x86_64 so that it runs on older Macs and under Rosetta on arm64 (M1 chip) machines. Given more time both QT and VTK might both catch up with the newer Apple silicon around.
Get VTK 9.1 package via Homebrew - you may need to force Homebrew to install a specific VTK version see Homebrew instruction on how to do so:
brew_86 insall vtk
Check/Update the path to the VTK package in the ./SPIERSview/SPIERSview.pro file, where "9.1.0" is your installed version number:
'LIBS += -L/usr/local/Cellar/vtk/9.1.0/lib/'
You should then be able to compile SPIERS by opening the .pro file in QT creator and following standard debug/release procedure.
Packaging of the individual apps is achieved by using the QT macdeployqt program:
/{path to QT}/Qt/5.15.2/clang_64/bin/macdeployqt /{path to build}/build-SPIERS-Desktop_Qt_5_15_2_clang_64bit-Release/SPIERSalign/bin/SPIERSalign64.app -always-overwrite -verbose=2
/{path to QT}/Qt/5.15.2/clang_64/bin/macdeployqt /{path to build}/build-SPIERS-Desktop_Qt_5_15_2_clang_64bit-Release/SPIERSedit/bin/SPIERSedit64.app -always-overwrite -verbose=2
/{path to QT}/Qt/5.15.2/clang_64/bin/macdeployqt /{path to build}/build-SPIERS-Desktop_Qt_5_15_2_clang_64bit-Release/SPIERSview/bin/SPIERSview64.app -always-overwrite -verbose=2
Note: it may be possible to install QT5.x/QT Creator via Homebrew rather than via the Apple App Store.
SPIERS is designed to run on a wide range of hardware, rather than being restricted to workstations. The exact requirements for use depend on the data being processed.
All documentation for SPIERS is online at Read the Docs. Links are found on the SPIERS website. This is a version controlled user manual automatically parsed from the .rst found under the docs folders in our software folders.
Contribution to the code in this repository is welcome. Please read the Repository Contribution document for information on our licencing, code of conduct, coding style, and repository structure before submitting any code updates.
Bug reporting and feature requests should be made through the GitHub Issues page for this repository. We will aim to respond to all issues and feature requests in a timely manner.
w:spiers-software.org/
t:@palaeoware
e:palaeoware@gmail.com