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I'm surprised (and disappointed) to see that the classic ray-tracing program povray has been dropped from the repositories on 12.04. What is the best way to install it? It doesn't appear that anyone has prepared a PPA for precise.

guntbert
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Andy
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  • [POV-Ray is now released under the Affero GPL](http://povray.org/povlegal.html), so it will probably return to the repositories within a few releases. – Mechanical snail Nov 14 '13 at 19:27

3 Answers3

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licensing

From the povray distribution license is not a GPL2+ or 3+ license that normally is the requirement for incorporation into the main ubuntu repositories.

Indeed - debian classify this as non-free - although why this package was not made available into multiverse, I'm not sure.

compiling

It's actually very simple to compile this command line application from source:

First install some prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Now download the source-code:

wget http://www.povray.org/redirect/www.povray.org/ftp/pub/povray/Official/Unix/povray-3.6.tar.gz

tar -zxvf povray-3.6.tar.gz
cd povray-3.6.1

Now configure it:

./configure COMPILED_BY="yourname <youremail@somewhere.com>"

N.B. use your email address.

Next - compile and install:

make
sudo make install

for the uninitiated...

This is an example output

save the contents from here as povpawn.pov

Now run povray

povray +Ipovpawn.pov

This will create a file in your folder called povpawn.png

enter image description here

More information from the povray website:

fossfreedom
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  • Worked like a charm. – Barton Chittenden Aug 13 '13 at 12:51
  • unfortunately, this won't work anymore because the archive is no longer hosted at povray.org - look at the github answer below. – Catherine Holloway Mar 31 '14 at 18:33
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    @CatherineHolloway: The old version is still available, the URL is http://www.povray.org/redirect/www.povray.org/ftp/pub/povray/Old-Versions/Official-3.62/Linux/povlinux-3.6.tgz. It's already compiled and should work out of the box. Use the contained `install` command (via `sudo`) to install it. – Florian Brucker Jun 17 '14 at 21:25
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You can get the newest POV-Ray version from github:

Get the source code

git clone https://github.com/POV-Ray/povray.git

Install required packages

sudo apt-get install libboost-dev zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg8-dev libtiff5-dev libopenexr-dev

Configure, Make, Install

cd unix/
./prebuild.sh
cd ../
./configure COMPILED_BY="your name <email@address>" 
make
sudo make install
sergej
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    On 14.04 64bit, I ran `./configure --with-boost-libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu COMPILED_BY="my name "` – knb May 04 '14 at 10:59
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    For those who are having boost thread issues when running `./configure`: `sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev` – auroranil May 24 '14 at 00:53
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I followed the instruction on the POv-Ray website, and did not encounter much problems during installation.

Bernhard
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