Quick Start

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This page contains information on how to get started with installing and running ASCEND on various platforms. Where they are available, we will suggest using binary distributions of ASCEND. If you have any problems with these instructions please let us know!

Once you're up and running, check the documentation for tutorials to help you get started.

[edit] Windows

You will need to have administrator rights when you install this program. The installer will check your system and, if you are missing certain prerequisite libraries, will download and install what is missing. To read about these dependencies, see Prerequisites for Windows.

The installer will add ASCEND to your Start menu; a number of sample models will be available by default in C:\Program Files\ASCEND\models. ASCEND models (.a4c) will open in the ASCEND PyGTK GUI if double-clicked.

The documentation contains some tutorials to help you get started.

[edit] Linux

We are providing binary packages for Fedora 7 and Ubuntu Feisty (7.04) at this stage. If you would like a binary package built for another distro, please let us know.

ASCEND is dependent on SUNDIALS which should install automatically after you download the RPM or DEB package for your system (this works on Fedora 7 and Ubuntu 7.04 at least). Note that on earlier versions of Ubuntu, there was a bug in the SUNDIALS package that may cause some problems. Contact us if you have difficulty.

Optional components worth installing are IPython and Matplotlib, both of which are easily available from the standard package repositories.

[edit] Other Platforms, or building from source

If you are not on Windows, Fedora 7 or Ubuntu Feisty, you will need to build ASCEND from sources. Alternatively, you might want to build from sources if you don't have admin rights for the machine you are on. These instructions work on Windows (via MinGW/MSYS) and various Linux distros, and should probably work OK on recent Solaris systems:

A quick outline of the process is:

  • download the source code tarball
  • check that you have the prerequisites for Linux installed. It should be possible to standard packages most, if not all, of these.
  • untar it: tar jxvf ascend-*.tar.bz2
  • cd ascend-0.9.5.108 (substitute the version number)
  • scons INSTALL_PREFIX=~ install
  • export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
  • ascend testlog10.a4c

When building, watch carefully the first 20 or so lines of output from the scons command, as they will tell you if any important dependencies were missing, or if parts of the software cannot be built for whatever reason. If you want to set more compilation options, view a list of them by typing scons -Qh.

  • We develop on Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7 most of the time; building there should work very well.
  • Building from source is known to work well on Fedora Core 5 and Fedora Core 6. We test this fairly often as well. See also building an RPM Package for ASCEND.
  • The old ASCEND IV Tcl/Tk-only source release from back in 2000 is also available on our SourceForge page. This is a relatively stable release, although we have added much new functionality since then.

[edit] Mac

ASCEND runs on Mac! We don't yet provide binary packages, but we have managed to compile ASCEND on Mac using Fink to provide the GCC compiler, SCons, SWIG, etc. See Building ASCEND for more details. If you are able to help with binary packaging, please contact us.

[edit] Solaris and Other Unices

  • The old Tcl/Tk-only was tested on a wide range of platforms. See http://ascend.cheme.cmu.edu/ for the download link.
  • Current code in the repository compiles but does not link; we have a problem that doesn't look too serious, but we haven't worked out the solution just yet.
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