Installation of opencascade, OCE, FreeCAD and pythonocc

[WvR]

I just want to share my experiences installing FreeCAD on my gentoo laptop(s). I am a complete newbie to FreeCAD and everything related to it. I just wanted to check it out, but installation was a bit more complex than I expected.

FreeCAD is an open-source CAD software project: www.freecadweb.org Presently (December 2013), FreeCAD-0.14 is the current version.

FreeCAD is based an open-source CAD library, called OpenCASCADE www.opencascade.org, which is at version 6.6.0 (December 2013). OpenCASCADE is also referred to as OCC and OCCT (OpenCasCade Technology). Note: the OCCT software is licensed with a special license, which may or may not be interpreted as "free" software. Some linux distributions do not accept the OCCT license.

There is a spin-off project from OpenCASCADE, called OCE: OpenCASCADE Community Edition. You need OCE together with OpenCASCADE to compile FreeCAD. OCE can be found at https://github.com/tpaviot/oce Current version is OCE-0.13 but you need to install OCE-0.12.

Finally, there is pythonocc, which is a Python wrapper around the OCCT libraries (which are mostly C++): https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc Present version in December 2013 is v0.6, which requires OCE-0.12

Installation steps:

1. Install OpenCASCADE from the gentoo ebuild

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 emerge -auvDN opencascade 

Note here that you may need to set USE-flags. I set the USE-flags "doc examples freeimage gl2ps java qt4 tbb" to get the most complete build

2. Install FreeCAD from the gentoo ebuild

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 emerge -auvDN freecad 

This will pull in the dependencies of FreeCAD (and there are quite a few). Note: the compilation of FreeCAD will fail, but it is the dependencies we are concerned with at the moment.

3. Install OCE-0.12. First, download the archive from https://github.com/tpaviot/oce/releases/tag/OCE-0.12 Extract the archive to a directory of your choice, for instance /home/user/oce-0.12

4.

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user@pc > cd oce-0.12
user@pc > mkdir cmake-build
user@pc > cd cmake-build
user@pc > cmake ..

This should finish without errors, as long as you installed OpenCASCADE before (to get the dependencies). Then

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user@pc > make
user@pc > sudo make install/strip

5. Now that OCE is installed, download the FreeCAD source from https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_sf_master/ Make a directory and unpack the archive: for example, from your home directory

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user@pc > mkdir freecad
user@pc > cd freecad
user@pc > tar xvzf ....
user@pc > mkdir cmake-build
user@pc > cd cmake-build
user@pc > cmake -D COIN3D_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/coin/ ..
user@pc > make
user@pc > sudo make install

6. If you are interested in pythonocc, go to the GitHub repository, and download the latest version https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc/archive/master.zip Unpack the archive to a directory, for example /home/user/pythonocc.

6a. If you want to have support for the GEOM package in pythonocc:

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user@pc > cd pythonocc/src/contrib/geom-6.3.1.8
user@pc > mkdir cmake-build
user@pc > cd cmake-build
user@pc > cmake ..
user@pc > make
user@pc > sudo make install

6b. If you want to have support for the SMESH package in pythonocc:

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user@pc > cd pythonocc/src/contrib/smesh-5.1.2.2
user@pc > mkdir cmake-build
user@pc > cd cmake-build
user@pc > cmake ..
user@pc > make
user@pc > sudo make install

7. Finally, make the pythonocc library:

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user@pc > cd pythonocc
user@pc > mkdir cmake-build
user@pc > cd cmake-build
user@pc > cmake ..
user@pc > make
user@pc > sudo make install