This distribution contains the complete source code of POV-Ray for UNIX as well as its accompanying HTML documentation and supporting files. In order to build the distribution supplied in the POV-Ray github repo, you will need to run a pre-build step. This generates the configure script and does a few other things usually performed by our developers prior to releasing a source package.
By default POV-Ray will attempt to build using system-supplied libraries for boost, zlib, libpng, libjpeg, libtiff, and openexr. We recommend you have the following packages pre-installed:
libboost-dev
libboost-date-time-dev
libz-dev
libpng-dev
libjpeg-dev
libtiff-dev
libopenexr-dev
To enable the render preview display also pre-install:
libsdl-dev
The --with-x ./configure option is currently meaningless as no X11 display option is presently implemented.
Lastly, certain OSX environments do not install the program pkg-config with autoconf. The program is currently necessary when determining the link library flags for openexr. In these situations also install:
pkg-config
% cd unix/
% ./prebuild.sh
% cd ../
% ./configure COMPILED_BY="your name <email@address>"
% make
Note that the prebuild step will generate a few warnings as it still looks for some files no longer included in current versions of POV-Ray. This is harmless.
% make install
This above installs POV-Ray under system-wide directories and needs root privileges. Installing as non-privileged user is also possible. By default (i.e. as root), 'make install' installs the following components (X.Y representing the first two fields of the version number, e.g. for v3.8.1 this would be 3.8):
povray binary (executable) in /usr/local/bin
data files (e.g. includes, scene files) in /usr/local/share/povray-X.Y
documentation (text and html) in /usr/local/share/doc/povray-X.Y
configuration files (e.g. povray.conf) in /usr/local/etc/povray/X.Y
The configuration files are also copied under the $HOME/.povray/X.Y directory of the user (or root) who is doing the installation.
Please see unix/install.txt for more details about available configuration options etc.