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Downloading and Installing VFGEN

  • Precompiled, statically linked executable files
  • Source code

Precompiled, statically linked executable files

Download the file that is appropriate for your system, if one is available here.

Computer Executable File Size
GNU Linux / x86 64 bit vfgen-2.5.0-x86_64 5.1 meg
Windows / Intel PC (32 bit) vfgen-2.5.0.exe 23 meg
Mac OS X (10.4) / PowerPC vfgen-2.5.0-mac-ppc 26 meg

After downloading the executable file, Linux and Mac users should rename the file to vfgen. Windows users should rename it to vfgen.exe.

In all versions, the program is a command-line program that is run from a terminal. The terminology for the program that gives you a command-line depends on the operating system:

  • In Linux, start a "Terminal" (also known as a "shell" or "console").
  • On a Mac in OS X, start a "Terminal".
  • In Windows, run a "Command Prompt".


Here are a few options for installing the program in Linux (or Linux-like) systems:

  • If you do not have root privileges, you can copy this file to your own bin directory, ~/bin, and rename it to "vfgen". (You may have to create the ~/bin directory if you don't already have one.) Then be sure that the directory ~/bin is included in your search path. Here is how you can do that if you use the bash shell:
    $ export PATH=~/bin:$PATH
  • If you are the system administrator for your computer system, or if you have root privileges, you can copy the executable file to /usr/local/bin (if you are using Linux) to make it available to all users. To be compatible with the examples in the VFGEN web page, rename the executable file to "vfgen".

  • If you don't want to bother with any of that, you can simply save the file in the same directory in which you will be working, and rename it to "vfgen". Then to run the program, instead of giving the command "vfgen", you will have to use "./vfgen". For example:
    $ ./vfgen check pendulum.vf


Source code

The source code for VFGEN is now on GitHub: https://github.com/WarrenWeckesser/vfgen

For the latest stable release, download this file:

  • vfgen-2.5.0.tar.gz
In the directory where the file was saved, run the command
$ tar xvzf vfgen-2.5.0.tar.gz
This will create the subdirectory vfgen-2.5.0. See the README file in that directory for instructions for building VFGEN.

In addition to the standard C/C++ libraries, VFGEN uses the libraries listed in the following table. You will need these libraries installed if you want to build VFGEN from the source code. Other versions of these libraries might work, but these are the versions that were used to develop and test VFGEN 2.5.0.

Mini-XML (version 2.8) A "mini" XML C Library www.minixml.org
GiNaC (version 1.6.2) C++ Library for Symbolic Mathematics www.ginac.de
CLN (version 1.3.3) Class Library for Numbers www.ginac.de/CLN

Note: Version 2.5 of the Mini-XML (mxml) library has a spelling error in one of its configuration files. If you install mxml version 2.5 from source, the spelling error causes the build of VFGEN to fail. To fix this, reinstall version 2.5 of mxml after changing @PHTREAD_LIBS@ to @PTHREAD_LIBS@ in the file mxml.pc.in.

Copyright © 2005-2014 Warren Weckesser