Recent site activity

APBS‎ > ‎User guide‎ > ‎Installation and availability‎ > ‎

Binary installation

We currently offer binaries for the RedHat Linux platform on a variety of architectures as well as command-line binaries for WinXP and Mac OS X. Binaries can be downloaded from the APBS download page. For all other systems, please install from source on your particular platform and feel free to contact the APBS users mailing list for more help and/or to request a binary for that system.

Warning If you are using APBS on a Windows system, you may not want to install it in a directory with spaces in the path name (e.g., C:\Program Files\) as this can cause problems with some visualization programs.  

For all platforms besides Windows, APBS binaries are provided in compressed tar format (*.tgz). On most systems, the binaries can be unarchived by simply double-clicking or opening the archive. This can also be accomplished on the command line by
gzip -dc apbs-#.#.#-XYZ.tgz | tar xvf -
where XYZ is the particular architecture of the binary you downloaded and #.#.# is the version number. Note that this will expand into a directory called apbs-#.#.#-XYZ. The contents of this directory can be placed anywhere on your system that you prefer (and have access to) and follow the structure:
  • bin -- contains the main APBS executable
  • share/apbs -- contains additional APBS-related files
    • doc -- the APBS programmer guide
    • examples -- APBS examples and tests
    • tests -- the APBS test suite
    • tools -- useful programs to help process APBS input and output
  • include -- header files for building software that calls APBS
  • lib -- libraries for building software that calls APBS

Comments