Geant4 tutorials made by Steven Walton:
We will go through tutorials and build our first Geant4 application, step by step First we will get a basic geometry, then get a visualization where we can run a beam through it, then we will focus on the physics
I am not an expert at Geant, this is both to help me learn and to help others that have the same problems as me. I welcome emails from others that would like to correct me and help with this. I am doing this because most of the information on Geant I see out there suggests that one should just review the examples and just dive in to making an application from there.
It is my belief that one should be able to see and make and understand what is the bare essentials before building more complex ones. Going through the examples there are a lot of different ways of doing things and I am trying to piece together the parts from the Geant4 User's Guide. Please reference this material, as it has much more information than I will include. The point of this is just to get your feet wet.
Remember that if you would like to add more options (such as data, graphics libraries, or multithreading) you can just run the cmake in your build directory and add them.
Standard Options are located on page 15 of this document. Please read it.
If you have separate root and home partitions you may want to check where you are installing to and make sure you have enough room. Follow the instruction document, but I use the following cmake command.
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/geant4-install_dir -DGEANT4_BUILD_MULTITHREADED=ON -DGEATN4_INSTALL_DATA=ON -DGEANT4_USE_GDML=ON -DGEANT4_USE_XM=ON -DGEANT4_USE_RAYTRACER_X11=ON -DGEANT4_USE_QT=ON -DGEANT4_USE_OPENGL_X11=ON /path/to/geant4.10.version.number
I have had some bugs when building and pointing to where the installed data is, so I suggest just letting Geant4 download the data for you. I also like using the QT visualization tools as it seems to work better with Ubuntu 16. It also has the most capabilities compared to the other visualization tools. This is the only visualizer needed but if you install more you can always call them or ignore them. I found when building with the other visualizers that I would have problems, and the QT version allows you to move the camera without having to manually set it. This can save some time if you need to view multiple angles.
Next we continue with the make
$ make -j6
This makes the build with 6 processors, replace 6 with the number of processors you
want to use (suggested max being 1 less than the number of threads you have)
If you are having problems building I suggest dropping down to one processor and adding VERBOSE=1.
# make install
Use sudo for this if you are installing to /opt, but you don't need sudo if you are
building into the home directory.
Remember if you want to add additional D flags you can always remake the build.
From a base Ubuntu 16.04 version you will need
- libxerces-c-dev
- libxmu-dev
I've also done some testing on Ubuntu on Windows. All these tutorials have been verified to work on XMing server and Xmanager5.
If you are trying to visualize runs (such as these tutorials)
-
Xmanager5 seems to work the best. There are a few glitches but nothing major. Note: I have not pushed the system.
-
XMing server works fine, but is glitchy. If you do not rotate your view the particles jump around while the run is happening. It looks normal when the run completes. When you try to rotate the view, XMing does not refresh at an acceptable rate, and will stutter. If you just care about the final view, XMing will work great (and it is free).