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Molflow on Debian-based Linux

Install using binaries

Molflow only runs on 64-bit Linux versions.

You need to use the terminal to...

  • Install dependencies
  • Make binaries executable
  • Run Molflow

For example, on Ubuntu LTS 24.04, the following is required:

  • Download and extract Molflow and open a Terminal in the directory where you extracted it
  • Make the two binaries executable in the molflow directory: chmod +x molflow molflowCLI
  • Run Molflow: ./molflow

For older versions (2.9 or before): * Add the universe repository to the apt package manager (probably you'll get a message that it's already added): sudo add-apt-repository universe * Install the p7zip package:
sudo apt install p7zip
* 2.9 versions might also require libgomp1, libopengl0 and libopengl-dev (OpenMP and OpenGL) * Versions not using vcpkg, i.e. 2.9-2.9.24 also require the libsdl2-2.0 gsl-bin libatlas-base-dev packages

  • Make the three binaries in Molflow's folder executable*:
    chmod +x molflow molflowCLI compress

    Tip

    On versions 2.7, there was no molflowCLI and on 2.8, molflowCLI was called molflowSub

Mint Linux

For Mint Linux, a user reported that the required install command is:

sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0 gsl-bin libatlas-base-dev p7zip libopengl0

For other Linux versions, the complete list of dependencies (with the apt package name in parentheses) is:

  • GTK+3.0 (libgtk-3-bin)
  • OpenGL (freeglut3-dev, mesa-utils)
  • X11 (xauth, xorg, openbox)

I'm happy if you report back errors or failures of the above instructions.

Build from source (2.9+)

You can also build MolFlow+ from source, which should work on most Linux distribution. See build instructions in the Gitlab repo.

Last update: September 1, 2025