Quick Download and Install

It is easy to install surfex once you have the required helper software installed that surfex needs to run.

See below for the short instructions.

If you need more detailed instructions, then please consult the PDF documentation (for Windows, for Linux / Unix / Mac OS X) which is contained in the "doc" sub-directory of the surfex package which you downloaded, and which is also available in the documentation section of this website.

Requirements

surfex is currently available for Linux/Unix, Windows (via Cygwin), and Mac OS X. It is free software which is distributed as is, without any warranty.

Essentially, you just need a working Java (version >= 1.5.0) and surf (version >= 1.0.2). Java is available for free from http://www.java.sun.com. surf is available for free from http://surf.sourceforge.net. Ralf Schmitt has adapted the surf code recently to make it compile smoothly using a recent compiler.
If you also want to produce movies using surfex then you'll also have to install the great image conversion tool called convert from the package ImageMagick (available from www.ImageMagick.org).

Download

Download and unpack the surfex package to a directory of your choice. This directory will be called install_dir in the sequel.

There is only one package which you have to download and which works on all currently supported systems:
surfex package download: surfex_0_90_00.tar.gz.

In a shell (under Windows a Cygwin-Bash), this can be done by typing: tar -xzf surfex_VERSIONNO.tar.gz

The current version of surfex is available from surfex.AlgebraicSurface.net.

For convenience, we also provide some of the previous versions:
0.90.00 (current version), 0.89.07, 0.89.06, 0.89.05.

Install

It is easy to install surfex once you have all the needed helper software already installed.

Just follow the steps below. For more detailed instructions, please consult the PDF documentation (for Windows, for Linux / Unix / Mac OS X) which is contained in the "doc" sub-directory of the surfex package which you downloaded, and which is also available in the documentation section of this website.

- Open a shell (under Windows, open a cygwin-shell)
- Type: cd install_dir (where install_dir is the directory to which you unpacked the surfex package)
- Run the INSTALL script. Depending on your system type, this can be done by typing: ./INSTALL_WINDOWS (on a Windows system),
./INSTALL_LINUX (on a Linux / Unix / Mac OS X system).
- This produces a script called "surfex" in the current directory and it also copies it to a directory which is contained in your bash path. You can now start surfex by typing:
surfex

First Steps

There are several ways of invoking surfex.

If you just want to visualize one single equation, e.g. x^3+y^2-z^2, then type:
surfex -e x^3+y^2-z^2

If you already have a surfex-file (usually with suffix .sux, e.g. A2sing.sux) then use:
surfex A2sing.sux

The examples section contains several .sux-files. Type surfex -h or see the documentation section for more information on how to use surfex.