The RMCProfile program mainly lives on a terminal, for all operating systems. So, a successful installation means, you have the RMCProfile terminal showing up (see instructions below for howto for each different operation system) and when typing ‘rmcprofile’ on the terminal, you see some welcome message instead of some error message like ‘command not found’ or whatever else errors.
Windows
On Windows, we basically just download the package here, unzip it, grab the ‘RMCProfile_package’ folder and put it somewhere on our system. In theory, it can be anywhere we like. But in practice, it will be best to put it somewhere shallow. For example, if we put it on the Desktop and we think it is shallow but if you happen to have a cloud drive service, like OneDrive, installed, they may change the actual path to your Desktop to be super long. In that case, putting the folder on the Desktop is not a good idea.
Once we decide a good spot to put the folder, we can go into the ‘RMCProfile_package’ folder and double click on the ‘RMCProfile_setup.bat’ file to launch the program. That is it.
There are two versions for Windows in the download page, parallel and serial one. Normally, the parallel version is working fine so I would suggest going with it first. If not working, then roll back to the serial version.
In old versions, the plotting stuff needs Xming to be installed, for which we can go to their website here to download the package and install. In the current release, we put in the ‘rmc_mon’ tool for plotting and ‘conf_viewer’ for structure configuration visualization so we no longer need the Xming to be installed. However, in case the new way does not work, rolling back to having Xming installed is still an option.
When running ‘rmc_mon’ (the visualization program — see the tutorials for more information), RMCprofile will try to launch a browser interface. Sometimes, you may see the error that it cannot connect to the server or something similar, in which case you may just want to go back to the RMCProfile terminal and run the ‘rmc_mon’ command again.
MacOS
On MacOS, we have the package in DMG format so you can just download the package, double click the DMG file and use drag-and-drop to install the program. To launch the program, you can use the key combo ‘[cmd]+[space]’ to call out your spotlight search and type in ‘rmcprofile’. When you see ‘/Applications/RMCProfile.app’ popping up in the list, press ‘[Enter]’ or use your mouse to click on it to launch the program.
Linux
On Linux distros, we first download the pacakge from the link here. You may realize that we have multiple options in the download page for Linux distros. Normally, the one with the ‘Linux’ label in the ‘Platform‘ column should work. In some cases for machines still running legacy version of Linux distros, you can try ‘Linux – Legacy’. For those machines with ARM processors, use ‘Linux – ARM64’. If you machine has Nvidia video card, you can use the ‘Linux – GPU’ version to enable the GPU acceleration.
Once downloaded, the package can be unzipped to anywhere on the system. Then on terminal, you ‘cd’ into the RMCProfile package directory where you see ‘exe’, ‘tutorial’, ‘RMCProfile_setup’ and ‘RMCProfile_setup_no_term’ by the ‘ls’ command. Next, type ‘./RMCProfile_setup_no_term’ to launch the RMCProfile program.