Obtaining and Installing DAVE Software

DAVE can be freely downloaded from the DAVE web page. DAVE is fully supported on Linux, Windows and MacOS X platforms. In addition, there are usually two versions of the software available at any one time: It is up to the user to decide what version and Operating System combination is best for them and to download this from the DAVE web page.

Brief instructions for installing DAVE

  1. Using Binaries
    Windows. Download the appropriate zip bundle. Unzip the downloaded file into a temporal directory. Navigate into the "dave" directory that is created, execute "Setup.exe" and follow the instructions to install DAVE. After installation an entry would be created in your start menu (as indicated during installation) from which you can launch DAVE. A destop shortcut is also created. Note that on some version of Windows, Administrator privileges are required to install an application.
    You can just as easily uninstall DAVE (requires Administrator privileges) using one of two methods:
    MacOS X.

    Note: X11 must be installed and running for DAVE to work. X11 for MacOS X can be obtained from Apple's X11 site.


    Linux. download the appropriate version from the link above and extract the files (eg "tar zxvf downloaded_file.tgz"). Then change directory to the "dave" directory and run "./dave". Please note that DAVE must be launched from the installation directory otherwise some program modules may not work properly.

    Note: If you are experiencing any problems with fonts and/or plotting, then you need to modify the file called 'dave' and change the line:
    topdir=`dirname $0`
    so that the topdir variable points to the installation directory in which the 'dave' file is located. For example, if the downloaded DAVE archive was extracted into a directory called /home/path/to/dave, the line in the 'dave' file should be
    topdir=/home/path/to/dave
    This modification should also enable dave to be executed from anywhere (without changing directory to the installation directory first). Thus DAVE can be launched by issuing the command '/home/path/to/dave/dave' from anywhere.
    In addition, executing the following soft link as root:
    ln -s /home/path/to/dave/dave /usr/local/bin/dave
    would give any user the ability to execute DAVE by simply typing dave on the command line irrespective of the current directory.


  2. From Source
    Note: A valid IDL license is required for this. The recommended IDL version is the one that we are currently using for our own builds (as indicated above for the stable and development versions).
    Download the appropriate stable or development source code zip bundle and extract the contents into a self-contained directory. There should be an IDL project file called 'dave.prj' in the top-level directory created. Proceed with the following steps to build and execute DAVE.