Installing brl-cad on a Debian system
Brl-CAD (http://brlcad.org) is a 3D CAD package created by the US Army. It is open source, and most versions are distributed as source.
Unforuntately the ./configure script does not fully detect the libraries and paths needed, and the documentation does not seem to list it either.
So on a machine that does not have scads of -dev packages installed what are you going to need.
1) Compiler/Tools
The default Debian install does install a basic set of compilation tools, but does not install g++ or bison, or make, you will need both:-
apt-get install g++ bison make
2) -dev packages
You will need the X11 development pacakges, and one extra that the basic that does not seem to install:-
apt-get install libx11-dev libxi-dev
You will also need zlib's -dev package:-
apt-get install zlib1g-dev
3) There are options to install various extra bits, such as some Java support. I have had the need to use these so I have not installed them yet.
I think I have remembered all of them, but I can not be sure.
Remember when you run ./configure that it puts things by default in /usr/brlcad - a very un-Debian place. So run ./configure as:-
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
You may need sudo for this last step, all the others can be done as a normal user.
There is a DEB file, on the brocad web site, but it is several releases out of date, and has no dependancy checking at all, so avoid it and use the source.
