Compile from source

The installation of Solstice consists of compiling the solver, the anim library, and the command line tools directly on the target machine. A simple way is to rely on star-build, which automates the build and installation of solstice, its dependencies, and a few post-processing tools from source code.

Compatibility

Solstice can be built on any POSIX system, starting with Linux.

For Windows users, there is no longer a Windows prebuilt version of Solstice. Also, native Windows build is no longer possible out of the box, nor supported. However, Solstice runs perfectly on the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Ask your favourite search engine for details on the topic.

Prerequisites

To build solstice with star-build, first make sure your system has the following prerequisites:

Build

Assuming that the aforementioned prerequisites are available, the build procedure is summed up to:

git clone git://git.meso-star.com/star-build.git
cd star-build
make \
  PREFIX=/path/to/solstice/ \
  BUILD=src/rad-apps/solstice_0.10.sh

With PREFIX defining the path where Solstice will be installed and BUILD defining the installation script to be run.

Run

Source the installed profile file in the current shell to register solstice against it. You can then run solstice and consult its manual pages:

. /path/to/solstice/etc/profile
solstice -h
man solstice

Refer to the Solstice: Absolute Beginner's Guide to quickly run a solar plant simulation through the solstice CLI; this archive provides input data and scripts and is a good starting point to begin with the Solstice framework.