How do I install the ray-tracing application POV-Ray on 12.04?

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.

Solution 1:

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 <[email protected]>"

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:

http://www.povray.org/documentation/

Solution 2:

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