[vtkusers] Compiling VTK 4.2 under MacOS 10.3.2

[Mark Asbach]

Salut Konrad,

> Checking Fink was of course my first attempt, but the Fink site says 
> that
> there is no vtk package, although I have seen references to such a 
> package on
> various Web sites. Perhaps there was one in earlier Fink releases?

Compiling VTK yourself is not that complicated and also pretty useful 
since there've been many improvements regarding 10.3 in VTK since 4.2 
and I can only recommend using the version from CVS. Look at the 
Quality Dashboard on vtk.org and make sure the latest nightly version 
compiles and runs fine on OS X 10.3.

You should install the latest version of CMake from CMake.org - the 
binary installer is okay.

If you want decent performance, set the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS in the 
Release-Variant to

"-O3 -mcpu=G3 -mtune=G4 -funroll-loops"

This will give you code that runs on any official OS X machine but will 
be optimized for a G4 (still no use of the AltiVec unit ...) if you use 
the Release mode. If you've never compiled vtk before, I would 
recommend ccmake over cmake (both commandline tools belong to CMake).

If you want Tk, install the Tcl/Tk batteries included Framework before.

Yours, Mark