What You Need to Use Ygdrasil

Ygdrasil can run on a wide range of hardware, from entry-level laptops to Linux clusters to Onyx supercomputers. This scalability is one of the real strengths of Ygdrasil - you can create an environment on a basic PC, then bring it to a more advanced VR system to display it. For artists, this means you can create work at home or in your studio, and then send it around the world to centers like Ars Electronica, ZKM, or ICC and it will run without having to recreate everything for their systems.

1. PC
   You need a PC - desktop or laptop. Ygdrasil doesn't run on the Mac yet - though now that Macs are Intel-based, this probably won't be far off. We suggest a Pentium 4 or newer, 512 MB of RAM, and an nVidia graphics card. For a low-end system, a Pentium III with 256 MB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 4 graphics card will work. Of course, faster processors and better graphics cards always help. We really recommend nVidia graphics cards for reasons we'll explain more below. Ygdrasil will run fine on Athlon or Intel boxes, will run on 64 bit processors, and will run on dual-core and dual-processor machines.
2. Linux
   ou will need to install Linux, either on a second partition, or on a second hard drive. Most current Linux distributions are very easy to install, and are good about dual-booting with Windows. There are many, many distributions of Linux, almost any of which will work fine. A few that we can suggest:
   • Suse
   • Fedora Core
   • Ubuntu and Kubuntu
   • Gentoo
   It's important to have good graphics card support. in general, nVidia cards have far superior support in Linux than ATI cards.
3. Software that Ygdrasil Needs:
   
   1. OpenGL Performer:
      download the free trial version from SGI's website
   2. CAVERN:
      a library for connecting networked multiuser worlds in Ygdrasil. Download -here- or bcchang's reconfigured package -here-
   3. the CAVE library:
      this is the core software component for all programs that use the CAVE. contact VRCO about a license, or EVL.
4. Ygdrasil itself
   This can be downloaded from EVL from the main Ygdrasil Home Page. there are several versions - the latest (as of this writing) is 0.4.3. Ygdrasil 0.4.3 is a massive update of the language, including a whole new graphic user interface for creating scenes in a visual graph rather than writing code by hand. This guide was written using the version prior to the 0.4 release, Ygdrasil 0.1.11, so it doesn't include the GUI; but most of the other material applies to any version.