Pivy works with Coin-2.4. For more information in how to access the specific version from the Subversion repository please consult the section about Subversion.

Any *nix-like OS where you manage to get Coin, Python and SWIG running will do. Pivy is known to run under Gentoo, Red Hat (Fedora), SuSE Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

The latest version from the SWIG main site should work. Currently (2005/08/11) Pivy works with SWIG-1.3.25.

Pivy uses distutils. In order to build Pivy simply run python setup.py build followed by an python setup.py install. Depending on your setup and platform you might need to gain root access to succesfully run the install command.

You should now be able to launch the examples in the examples/Mentor/ directory.

If you have installed Coin as framework (the default), you will need to set a symbolic link to the header files. (The reason for this is that Swig does not support frameworks yet.)

ln -s /Library/Frameworks/Inventor.framework/Headers /usr/local/include/Inventor

That's because the Finder needs so-called "app bundles" to correctly dispatch events. An application bundle is a hierarchically organized directory that contains the executable plus optional additional resources, such as images, sound files, and so on. (If you want the gory details, please refer to the relevant ADC documentation.)

To make a long story short, you must create an app bundle, or else your key presses will end up in the Terminal window instead of being sent to your application. The easiest way for you to set up that structure is to use the coin-config (or soqt-config) utility to create a bundle for you:

$soqt-config --build-app foo.py

To run the application, you can then type

$ open foo.py.app

You must have VC++ .NET 2003 (VC++ 7.1) and a Python version >= 2.4 installed in order to build Pivy on Windows. Make sure that the COIN3DDIR environment variable (pointing to your Coin root directory) is set.

Please note: SoWin and SoQt are the only SoGui bindings supported out of the box by the Pivy build system. In case you run into problems and it does not build, make sure to remove the build directory completely which is located in the root of the Pivy source tree before you try another compile.