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The main purpose of this program was to illustrate the possibility of
creating a graphical user inteface in C. At that time, three persons were
involved in the project:
Niels Bassler,
Alexandru Csete and
Morten Weinreich.
After fullfilling that, we have
decided to continue and finish the program so it could be released as a more
or less usefull piece of software. Today only Niels Bassler and
Alexandru Csete contributes to the development of the program.
You can see a screenshot if you want.
The idea was to write a program which could simulate an experiment, where the
radioactive decay of various materials can be studied by simple means, without
having all the trouble with getting a real experiment to work (but what
actually makes experimental physics fun). The audience could
be a schoolclass having introduction to radioactive decay.
As GUI library we have chosen Gtk+,
The Gimp ToolKit, which is built on top of Gdk, The Gimp Drawing Kit. These libraries
were originally written for the development of the well known Gimp, but they turned out to be very usefull and many
programs use them today.
The program is being developed under Linux so, as you might have guessed, you
will need Linux and Gtk+ installed.
Other platforms with Gtk+ installed should work as well but
have not been tested. If you succesfully compile this program on some other platform, we would
really appreciate if you would let us know, so we could mention it here.
So far, the program has been reported to work on FreeBSD 4.2 with Gtk 1.2.8 installed.
The program does NOT
require Gnome, and runs fine on older
machines (one of the
development PCs is a Pentium 233Mhz with 64Mb RAM).
The VP7 Way Kool Project is free software released under the terms and conditions of the
GNU General Public License.
You must read it unless you already are familiar with it.
The latest version of the program is 0.5.0 which is stable and running fine,
but the simulations are not quite realistic yet:
If you are used to live on the bleeding edge of opensource development, we suggest you
try the CVS version as well. You can get it through the
Sourceforge page.
The vp7wkp-X.Y.Z.tar.gz package contains the source code for the
program (X.Y.Z is the version number). You unpack it
with tar -xvfz vp7wkp-X.Y.Z.tar.gz.
The directory structure is:
./vp7wkp-X.Y.Z/src/ The source code
./vp7wkp-X.Y.Z/docs/ Some scattered, unorganized documents
./vp7wkp-X.Y.Z/pixmaps/ Pixmaps used by the program
./vp7wkp-X.Y.Z/data/ Radioactive sources for the program
To compile the program, change to the vp7wkp-X.Y.Z directory and type
make. If you have Gtk+ installed and
configured correctly, the program should now compile without problems. You will
get a binary executable vp7wkp in the main directory
vp7wkp-X.Y.Z/. You should run the binary from a terminal, because the program
writes a lot of funny stuff when starting and loading.
After you succesfully have installed the program, you might want to play
around with it.
The confugration file vp7wkp.cfg contains a list of the sources
the program reads in when it is started. You can change them if you want. If
you specify a file name that does not exist, an dummy source called "empty"
will be loaded instead.
There is a text file called src_format.txt in the ./data/
subdirectory. It describes the anatomy of a source file and how you can
create your own radioactive sources.
If you want to find some data on radioctive nuclei
The Lund/LBNL Nuclear Data Search is just the place for you. Have fun!
See the Bugtracker on the project page at
SourceForge. You can also use it to submit new bugs.
We would like to hear your comments and opinions on The VP7 Way Kool Project. Please use the public
forums on the SourceForge project page
or email us at wkp@vp7.dk. Thanks!
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