Installing ParaView (Ubuntu) - norlab-ulaval/Norlab_wiki GitHub Wiki
As lots of lab members may tell you, ParaView is very useful for analyzing point clouds and assessing ICP-based maps and trajectories. We can easily install ParaView using apt
:
sudo apt install paraview
Yet, the apt
version of ParaView can easily be outdated compared to the latest releases on the official website : as of writing, apt
only installs ParaView 5.4.1
on Ubuntu 18.04, while ParaView's website yields ParaView 5.10.1
.
The /opt
directory is a great place for installing ParaView. Download the tar.gz of the ParaView version of your liking. Once the download is complete, open a terminal from where you downloaded ParaView.
# Create a folder in /opt to install ParaView
sudo mkdir /opt/paraview
# Untar inside /opt/paraview
sudo tar xzf ParaView-<version+rest-of-the-file-name>.tar.gz -C /opt/paraview --strip-components=1
# Ex :
# sudo tar xzf ParaView-5.10.0-MPI-Linux-Python3.9-x86_64.tar.gz -C /opt/paraview --strip-components=1
# Symlink to run ParaView from the terminal
ln -s /opt/paraview/bin/paraview ~/bin/paraview
ParaView icons are included in the tar.gz
more specifically in /opt/paraview/share/icons/hicolor
. These icons will be copied inside ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor
:
cp -r /opt/paraview/share/icons/hicolor ~/.local/share/icons/
# Update the icon cache
sudo update-icon-caches ~/.local/share/icons/*
Ubuntu uses MIME types and packages xmls to determine which applications can be used to open files that have certains file extensions. We will save the following file inside ~/.local/share/mime/packages/paraview.xml
:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
<mime-type type="application/x-paraview">
<comment>ParaView Document</comment>
<comment xml:lang="en_US">ParaView Document</comment>
<glob pattern="*.pvd" />
<glob pattern="*.pvs" />
<glob pattern="*.vti" />
<glob pattern="*.vtp" />
<glob pattern="*.vts" />
<glob pattern="*.vtu" />
<glob pattern="*.case" />
<glob pattern="*.sos" />
<glob pattern="*.vtk" />
<icon name ="paraview"/>
</mime-type>
</mime-info>
We then need to update the mime database :
sudo update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime
There we go ! We now have .vtk
files with a ParaView MIME type and with ParaView icons !
We now need to configure Ubuntu in order to include ParaView in the list of applications that can used to open .vtk
files. For that, we must create a Desktop Entry that could be used to launch ParaView from the Activities Menu. Luckily for us, there is a ParaView desktop file in /opt/paraview/share/applications
. We can copy it in the appropriate directory :
cp /opt/paraview/share/applications/org.paraview.ParaView.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/paraview.desktop
Add the following line to ~/.local/share/applications/paraview.desktop
:
MimeType=application/x-paraview;
As with earlier configurations, we must update the desktop entries database :
sudo update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications
Done ! We can now run ParaView directly by opening .vtk files !