Desktop mode

Overview

In desktop mode (the default if you download and install VoxBo on a fresh machine), VoxBo acts like traditional desktop software. You ask it to do something and it does it. While this may not sound that exciting, it's actually new for VoxBo. In the past, because many imaging analyses are so time-consuming, VoxBo's default was to place jobs in a job queue to be executed later, usually on a cluster of many machines.

If you're used to using VoxBo the old way, with the queue, then you'll find that desktop mode works almost exactly the same. The major difference is that when you "submit" something to run, instead of going to the queue (where you would check its progress with voxq, it runs immediately, using as many CPU cores as you have available (you can restrict this by setting the environment variable VOXBO_CORES).

Desktop mode is similar in its goals to the long-defunct "single-user mode," which never really worked that well. Desktop mode seems to work really well, although I'm working on a better interface for using it with graphical programs (right now the output still goes to a terminal window).

Installation

First, the short version. To install VoxBo, you need to:

• unpack the distribution
• rename the directory it creates to HOME/voxbo (where HOME is the path to your home directory)
• add HOME/voxbo/bin to your path

In general, all you really have to do is unpack it and make sure the binaries are in your path. The VoxBo distribution is in a gzipped tar file called something like

voxbo-1.8.5pre8-linux.tar.gz

Unpack it from within your home directory thusly:

tar xzvf voxbo-1.8.5pre8-linux.tar.gz

This will give you a directory called "voxbo-1.8.5pre8-linux". If you have an existing VoxBo directory in your home directory, you probably want to rename it so that you can give the new one the same name. Do something like:

mv voxbo oldvoxbo
mv voxbo-1.8.5pre8-linux voxbo

It helps some of the programs if they can find auxiliary files located in the distribution. So it's best if you call it voxbo, .voxbo, or VoxBo (all in your home directory), and it will be found automatically. If you like none of these options, you can set the environment variable VOXBO_USERDIR to wherever you want it, and all should be well.

You'll also want to make sure the VoxBo binaries (which start off in VoxBo/bin) are in your path. So either edit your shell startup file to add that directory to your path, or put the binaries somewhere that's already in your path. To get started immediately, you could just do something like this:

PATH=$PATH:~/voxbo

You're now ready to use VoxBo!