BALL and BALLView packages in Ubuntu 10.04 and the upcoming Debian Squeeze

The BALL project's latest version 1.3.2 is included in Lucid Lynx, the latest LTS version of Unbuntu (10.04), and will be included in the upcoming debian release (squeeze).

In order to use BALLView, it is sufficient to install the 'ballview' package. It should then be available under "Programs->Education->Science".

The packages "libball1.3-dev" and "libballview1.3-dev" provide everything that is needed to develop programs that use the BALL and VIEW libraries (to use these libraries, it should be sufficient to add "-lBALL" and, if required, "-lVIEW" to the call of your linker, so, e.g., g++ test.C -o test -lBALL should do the trick).

Python bindings will be installed together with BALLView, but can also be installed seperately through the packages "python-ball" and "python-ballview" (to use them, an "import BALL" and "import VIEW" should suffice).

Finally, the reference documentation for the library can be installed through the package "libball1.3-doc".

 Please note that the first versions of the packages show an inconsistency that does not allow to use the python bindings from BALLView. This will be fixed as soon as possible and pushed as an update.