The Folding@home viewer allows you to visualize protein folding simulations and monitor the status of the simulation work units as they run on your computer. Installing and running the viewer is not necessary to run Folding@home.

For more information see: https://foldingathome.org/

To build FAHViewer from source you must first build C!. This section outlines the recommended procedure.

If you don't already have them install both Git and SCons:

• http://git-scm.com/downloads
• http://www.scons.org/download.php

Or in Debian Linux:

sudo apt-get install scons git

First create a build directory then get all the source repositories from GitHub:

mkdir build
cd build
git clone https://github.com/CauldronDevelopmentLLC/cbang.git
git clone https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-client-version.git
git clone https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-viewer.git

You will need the freetype and freeglut libraries.

sudo apt install libfreetype6-dev freeglut3-dev pkg-config

Fetch the pre-compiled freetype binaries for Windows from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/ubawurinna/freetype-windows-binaries.git

Download the pre-compiled freeglut binaries from MSYS2:

• http://repo.msys2.org/mingw/x86_64/mingw-w64-x86_64-freeglut-3.2.1-1-any.pkg.tar.xz

Extract mingw-w64-x86_64-freeglut-3.2.1-1-any.pkg.tar.xz and rename the resulting mingw64 folder to freeglut.

Finally, rename the freeglut libraries from the MinGW convention to the MSVC convention, so that SCons will find them:

• Rename freeglut\lib\libfreeglut.dll.a to freeglut\lib\glut32.lib
• Rename freeglut\lib\libfreeglut_static.a to freeglut\lib\freeglut_static.lib

In the build directory setup some environment variables which will allow the build systems to find each other.

In Windows:

set BUILD_ROOT=%HOMEPATH%\path\to\build
set CBANG_HOME=%BUILD_ROOT%\cbang
set FAH_CLIENT_VERSION_HOME=%BUILD_ROOT%\fah-client-version
set FAH_VIEWER_HOME=%BUILD_ROOT%\fah-viewer
set FREETYPE2_INCLUDE=%BUILD_ROOT%\freetype-windows-binaries\include
set FREETYPE2_LIBPATH=%BUILD_ROOT%\freetype-windows-binaries\win64
set GLUT_INCLUDE=%BUILD_ROOT%\freeglut\include
set GLUT_LIBPATH=%BUILD_ROOT%\freeglut\lib

Replace %HOMEPATH%\path\to\build with the correct path.

In Linux or OS-X:

BUILD_ROOT=$HOME/path/to/build
export CBANG_HOME=$BUILD_ROOT/cbang
export FAH_CLIENT_VERSION_HOME=$BUILD_ROOT/fah-client-version
export FAH_VIEWER_HOME=$BUILD_ROOT/fah-viewer

Replace $HOME/path/to/build with the correct path.

It is often convenient to put these variables in a env file, or env.bat for Windows. Then you can reload the environment at any time with:

In Windows:

env.bat

In Linux or OS-X:

source ./env

See the link below for instructions:

https://github.com/CauldronDevelopmentLLC/cbang#prerequisites

Note that you do not require all the modules and dependencies from C! to build FAHViewer. The following C! build options should work:

scons with_openssl=no disable_local=libevent

Once you've got the code, setup your environment and built C!:

scons -C $FAH_VIEWER_HOME

If all goes well this will produce FAHViewer (or FAHViewer.exe in Windows) in $FAH_VIEWER_HOME.

To build in debug mode add debug=1 optimze=0 to all of the scons commands.

To build a package for your system you can run:

scons -C $FAH_VIEWER_HOME package

If you encounter errors during the build process you can try bulding in non-strict mode by adding strict=0 to the scons commands. This tells the build system to not treat compile warnings as errors.

If a build fails, SCons will usually create a file called config.log. If you look towards the end of the file you can often see exactly what failed. When reporting build problems it is a good idea to include this file in the report.

C! targets 32-bit Windows by default. You can confirm by checking the start of the C! compiler output for the following lines (specifically the Arch line):

scons: Reading SConscript files ...
   Compiler: cl (msvc)
   Platform: win32
       Mode: msvc
       Arch: x86

To override Arch, set the following environment variable:

set TARGET_ARCH=amd64

and then recompile C!.

Sometimes SCons get's messed up. This can happen if it is interrupted during the configuration process. You can delete SCons' data and start again with the following commands:

In Windows:

rd /S /Q .sconf_temp
del .sconsign.dblite

In Linux or OS-X:

rm -rf .scons*

Then try your build again.