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Molflow on Debian-based Linux

Build from source (2.9+)

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

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 22.04, the following is required:

  • Download and extract Molflow and open a Terminal in the directory where you extracted it
  • 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 SDL2 framework, the GNU Scientific Library and the cblas packages:
    sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0 gsl-bin libatlas-base-dev p7zip
    2.9 versions might also require libgomp1, libopengl0 and libopengl-dev

  • 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

  • Run Molflow: ./molflow

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)
  • SDL2 (libsdl2-2.0)
  • libpng (libpng)
  • GNU Scientific Library (gsl-bin)
  • cblas (libatlas-base-dev)
  • Curl (curl)
  • X11 (xauth, xorg, openbox)

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

Last update: December 21, 2023