Igor on Linux ???

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We are often asked if we might port Igor to Linux. The answer is that it is a possibility for the future but not the near future.

Some Igor users have reported success running Igor on Linux under Wine or under Crossover Office which, as I understand it, is a commercialized version of Wine.

If you have comments about Igor on Linux or want to encourage (or discourage) us from porting to Linux in the future, feel free to add your comments here.
hrodstein wrote:

If you have comments about Igor on Linux or want to encourage (or discourage) us from porting to Linux in the future, feel free to add your comments here.


I for one strongly encourage you to do it! (moreover, I am more than willing to beta-test it :-) )

There has been some talk about better integrating Gizmo into Igor, to bring it on par with 2D graphs (in terms of usability and output). I think this would be an excellent opportunity to consider linux as well, as OpenGL is already quite mature on the platform. Naturally, porting the 2D graphics is a different matter completely, but then again, hardware-accelerated 2D routines have been available on all platforms for quite a while...

The non-graphics part of Igor should be comparatively less demanding to port. At any rate, if you also plan 64bit support, adding linux as a platform for this part should be a relatively minor effort during the necessary code review...

Thank you for Igor, and keep up the good work!

February 17, 2010 at 01:41 am - Permalink

Both my group and WM would benefit from a Linux version of Igor Pro. In my group with 5 scientists we are 2 using Windoze, 2 Linux (Ubuntu 9.x) and one Mac OS X. I use my own copy of Igor regularly, my colleagues have been learning it . My penguin colleagues (I am a windozer myself) have experimented with Igor under wine, which works, but it is slow, they have to use tweaks like the UseOldGraphics, and it is far more prone to freeze than in a native environment. I think they are currently using the windows version of Igor via Windows in a virtual machine, if they have to. Part of our data is happy with specialized free software like Gwyddion, part needs a more thorough analysis. Right now it is mainly me, who does the latter.

What's in it for WM? I successfully Igor-vangelized our general physics labs and the students are a mixture of OS users just the same way as we "grown-ups". Reaching out to the Linux users among them is bound to generate some more Igor users every year from those, who now mix GNUplot, Matlab and wossnames... :-)

Cheers!
Daniel

========
Time to find out, whether you are dead right, or just dead.

February 17, 2010 at 02:40 am - Permalink

Having Igor working on Linux would be good for a series of reasons.

- It would enlarge the community. In absolute numbers Linux users might be a minority respect WinOS and OSX ones. However they represent a significant and growing number among the PC users involved in number crunching and data plotting/analysis.

- Developing countries as China and India are most prone to use Linux rather than WinOS. A Linux version of Igor would open up new markets for WMs.

- It would allow Igor to run on large clusters of PCs using an OS that makes better use of the hardware resources. The trend is clear in science. The amount of data to process, and not only in science, is growing following at least the Moore's Law. How would Igor keep up with that?

- Linux-embedded hardware systems would have an easy way to be programmed and interfaced. And Linux runs on practically any type of CPUs.

- Linux code is open then it should be much easier to write XOPs to interface Igor with any available hardware acquisition devices.

Just my two cents.

February 17, 2010 at 05:46 am - Permalink

I am running the latest beta release of wine (1.1.37 if memory serves) built as a universal (32- and 64-bit) binary via Macports on my Snow Leopard iMac at work. (I'm home sick today.) I managed to get MS Office 2007 to run on it, and the speed is blazing fast. Unbelievably fast, actually.

So, I'm wondering if upgrading to the latest wine version will help. Or, could the problem be the way Ubuntu distributes the load onto the CPUs?

I'll try to install the IGOR demo on my work computer and report back, but my impression is that the latest wine builds are much, much more functional and a lot faster, at least on Snow Leopard.

February 17, 2010 at 10:02 am - Permalink

I would just like to second the previous responses (and have my "vote" counted :). As has been pointed out in previous posts: especially for number crunching Linux is where a lot of action is at and being able to use Igor on that platform would be practical (not to mention comfortable).

February 17, 2010 at 02:27 pm - Permalink

i think it would be great to be able to remotely log into a linux box through a terminal (ssh?) and set igor running various (number crunching) tasks through the command line with no graphical interface. ive tried igor on wine and have been largely successful. However, im too scared to run any of my multi-threaded processing functions as im expecting something to go wrong instantly. Has anyone tried this?

February 18, 2010 at 01:15 am - Permalink

It's unlikely that anything could get damaged, unless your multithreaded code deletes files and data. If it does, keep backups, and just try it. About the worst would be that you would have to re-boot.

John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

February 18, 2010 at 05:06 pm - Permalink

I have had success using Igor in WINE, but I have a list of problems documented here:

http://www.igorexchange.com/node/1098

which people are encouraged to add to. Much easier to implement than a version of Igor native to Linux would be fixing the issues listed in that thread, and being open to fixing more as they are reported. However, I don't know how many of these issues can be fixed by changing Igor, and how many can only be fixed by changing WINE. It is an open source project, though, so one could always contribute... and to the extent that WINE does not faithfully replicate the Igor experience, it is probably a failure to faithfully replicate the Win32 API, which means it would be generally useful to the WINE community.

Is this a worthwhile intermediate step until a version of Igor native to Linux is released? I think it probably would be.

February 18, 2010 at 07:49 pm - Permalink

Per RGerkin's post above, I will post some benchmarks that I just ran on the demo version of IGOR Pro for Windows which I just installed on my iMac within wine 1.1.39 (which was built this morning via Macports). HTH.

FWIW, here are the benchmark 2.02 numbers. I hope they are relevant to claims of sluggishness reported above under wine.

**** test on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)5.1.2600 using 6.12 and 21 passes; 2.66 GHz iMac
Create new graph time: 533.26ms, relative speed= 0.56
big data update time: 152.04ms, relative speed= 0.94
curve fit time: 4.21ms, relative speed= 0.45
user curve fit time: 16.51ms, relative speed= 2.15
double complex fft time: 812.66µs, relative speed= 1.81
single complex fft time: 744.13µs, relative speed= 1.60
double real fft time: 391.29µs, relative speed= 1.44
single real fft time: 348.60µs, relative speed= 1.41
5 pass smooth time: 317.84µs, relative speed= 1.71
Sort 8192 points time: 12.47ms, relative speed= 3.07
WaveStats time: 594.70µs, relative speed= 0.45
simple eqn time: 290.00µs, relative speed= 4.81
exp eqn time: 552.53µs, relative speed= 3.64
sqrt eqn time: 388.65µs, relative speed= 4.55
sin eqn time: 550.42µs, relative speed= 2.11
User fit fctn time: 492.83µs, relative speed= 2.62
MatrixOp eqn time: 67.97µs, relative speed= 0.35
**** done ****
total test time= 21.3781

February 22, 2010 at 12:45 pm - Permalink

In my experience it is the GUI and the data acquisition that will take the most effort if anyone is to convert Igor to run on Linux.

April 26, 2010 at 06:35 pm - Permalink

Not being a programmer, unfortunately I cannot contribute to the discussion of
how difficult it would be to make IGOR run on Linux.
I am running it occasionally on Linux using wine and most things just work fine.
But if there was a Linux version of IGOR, I definitely would be a user.

May 11, 2010 at 05:11 am - Permalink

does anyone have a code to convert Igor commands (usually saved in the procedure window) to Gnuplot commands? I am not so familiar with the Gnuplot commands. Therefore,
I am not sure whether the Gnu also is composed of commands like Igor Pro. If there would be a converter, it would be very helpful for me because I can skip several processes of manual
conversion for the graphs which were created by Gnuplot.

August 3, 2010 at 05:56 pm - Permalink

I think that it would be much, much easier to make contributions to the WINE project that fixed the remaining Igor-under-WINE bugs than to create an Igor-for-Linux from scratch. Plus, you'll probably get support from the WINE dev community -- and unlike the rest of the Linux world they probably won't care that Igor is closed-source, since that's pretty much true of everything people want to run under WINE.

It's also possible that in fixing the remaining bugs, you can actually maintain the Windows build more-or-less as is, without even needing a separate Linux build. Some of the bug fixes will be in WINE itself, and some others won't actually change the behavior of the Windows build in Windows. It seems like a very within-reach goal.

That said, Igor under WINE is no way to run hardware devices; but in my world, at least, most of my devices don't have Linux drivers anyway.

Rick

August 23, 2010 at 10:10 pm - Permalink

My job would be greatly facilitated by a Linux version of Igor.
My acquiring computer runs on Win XP, but all our servers are based on Linux.
I guess we are not the only ones who do the hard core number crunching on Linux machines.

Vassilis

January 31, 2012 at 08:48 am - Permalink

A Qt based implementation of Igor would run on (almost) any OS.
Just my two cents.

November 11, 2012 at 12:30 pm - Permalink

I may as well join the rebellion by stating that Igor is the last software that keeps me with windows. ;)
So, a linux version may not be world-changing for me since windows is okay. But it would be tempting to have all software I use cross-platform or just stay on linux all day.

November 11, 2012 at 01:37 pm - Permalink

nleclercq wrote:
A Qt based implementation of Igor would run on (almost) any OS. Just my two cents.


A Qt-based Igor, which we are working on, is a big step toward running on Linux but there are still many big steps beyond that. For example, we would have to convert all of our file-handling and graphics code, which currently use Macintosh or Windows APIs, to Qt.

I'm hopeful that a Linux port will be possible but we won't know for a while, perhaps for a year. In the meantime we are following your feedback on the issue.

November 11, 2012 at 02:12 pm - Permalink

hrodstein wrote:
A Qt-based Igor, which we are working on...

That's good very news! It's clearly a huge task but it's worth the effort.

November 13, 2012 at 01:49 am - Permalink

Hello,

I am a Linux user as well as many of my colleagues. I wish to see Igor Pro in Linux. The barrier of using igor pro at all in our work is that it is windows only!. I wonder if there is any update on this topic?

Best regards

January 12, 2013 at 04:14 pm - Permalink

The majority of the statistics and physics courses taught at Copenhagen University, which use computers and programming as part of the curriculum, use Linux. That includes the entire bioinformatics department, as well. Ive talked to a few professors about Igor, for example how much more user friendly it is than say, Root (Cern), and they expressed interest but the Linux issue kept coming up. Cant be the only university that will have these kinds of issues.

January 12, 2013 at 05:03 pm - Permalink

KatySmith wrote:
Hello,

I am a Linux user as well as many of my colleagues. I wish to see Igor Pro in Linux. The barrier of using igor pro at all in our work is that it is windows only!. I wonder if there is any update on this topic?

Best regards


Just want to point out that everybody but me in my lab runs a Mac, and we all use Igor.

January 12, 2013 at 05:04 pm - Permalink

Quote:
I am a Linux user as well as many of my colleagues. I wish to see Igor Pro in Linux. The barrier of using igor pro at all in our work is that it is windows only!. I wonder if there is any update on this topic?


A Linux version of Igor is a possibility but we won't be in a position to make a decision for about a year. See my comment from 2012-11-11.

In the meantime it is possible to run Igor under WINE.

January 12, 2013 at 06:08 pm - Permalink

Here in our physics department all students boxes are running under linux. In the labs there is a mixture of windows/linux boxes. No macs at all. I think having a native linux port of igor would make a big difference in the lab. because now people are useing a mixture of igor or origin and qtiplot (the latter to are quite similar) depending on their choice of operating system. but if igor would run on linux as well it would make things easier for data exchange and people could stick to one workflow.

February 14, 2013 at 05:50 am - Permalink

If Igor worked 100% in Wine, I would be fine with that. The big issue that completely keeps me from using Igor in Linux is #18 in http://www.igorexchange.com/node/1098. All escapes create illegible text in the axes labels. If it were possible to correct for this, I wouldn't have to reboot every time I want to use Igor Pro. Of course, a version that just works for Linux would be great, too.

March 24, 2014 at 07:27 am - Permalink

As it seems that the purpose of this thread is to gather community support for porting Igor to Linux, I officially SUPPORT this!! I have recently switched to Ubuntu as my main OS, and it has been a great transition. I find data analysis (mainly using Python tools) to be much more streamlined, and I really appreciate all the variety of open-source tools and software that are available. However, I can't give up the awesome plotting abilities and ease of use features with Igor. Partitioning or running a virtual machine are not ideal options, and I have been running Igor through WINE (although a somewhat inactive thread, progress on solutions to Igor/WINE problems are posted here: http://www.igorexchange.com/node/1098).

I have been using Igor since 2010, and would like to continue. My research is on icesheet dynamics of the Greenland Icesheet. If you use Igor and would like to see a Linux version, post your support here!

--Patrick
University of Montana

August 25, 2014 at 09:54 am - Permalink

Have there been any updates or major decisions in regards to Linux? Surely the demand has only increased over the last couple of years... or have people given up on a native (non-Wine) solution? Perhaps with version 7 the porting would be easier now?

May 6, 2017 at 06:31 pm - Permalink

We've had relatively few users express an interest in a Linux version. Since Igor 7 uses Qt, it's more possible for us to port to Linux than before, but we still have a lot of platform dependent code that would need to be re-written. Also, a Linux port would require testing everything on yet another operating system. We also don't have extensive experience using Linux.

May 7, 2017 at 08:10 pm - Permalink

Hi all,

Just a small message in order to express my interest in getting Igor supported on Linux.

Also, if you want to count/probe the number of people who would be interested in Igor for Linux, maybe you should make a pool?

Thank you for your very nice support and all,

Best,

T.

September 5, 2018 at 01:48 pm - Permalink

For non-essential stuff (read no hardware interfaces, etc.), I run Igor in virtualbox and it works pretty well.

best,

_sk

September 7, 2018 at 12:25 am - Permalink

Sorry for reviving this discussion, but as I can see there are also recent replies.

It would absolutely be helpful to have Igor running on Linux. I fully appreciate the difficulties there may be after all, but it would be still great if the port can be done in part. For example, it would be nice if I can start doing analysis on my much more powerful Threadripper system which (unfortunately) runs Linux, where I am really using basic logic loops and some Integrate functions.

In my school, we particularly have a lot of 28 core workstation which we may control remotely, however at the end they all run Linux, this prevent me (and my group which uses Igor) from utilizing them which is a pity.

 

 

I just tried wine on my ubuntu 18.04 LTS server, it used to work (Fedora 26) but it breaks again, this is why wine isn't really a productive method at the end. Once you get it to work you must leave it be otherwise it takes hours if not days to figure out what's wrong. I might go back to use KVM again but I found the performance hit was significant (60% of bare metal on ubuntu, I think Fedora will be better).

September 29, 2018 at 01:09 pm - Permalink

Dear Wavemetrics team,

 

I understand that you were not willing to package Igor for every Linux distribution that is out there. However, things have changed drastically with universal packages on Linux. So you could easily provide either a flatpak (or Appimage or snap) and Igor would run basically on every single Linux distribution that is out there.

This makes packaging for Linux as easy or difficult as for Windows or Mac.

And since you cater a scientific community where Linux is quite broadly adopted this would be highly appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance

Konstantin

June 24, 2022 at 05:40 am - Permalink

I've been using Igor for 20 years now.  I used to use it many hours a day but have since switch to Linux.  I hate booting into Windows, and, as a result, I find that I'm using Igor less and less these days.  I would use it a lot more if it were available on Linux.

July 23, 2022 at 06:59 pm - Permalink

+1 for Igor on Linux.

I use a MacBook Pro at work (and at home). Igor is (and has been) the only program that has prevented me from adopting Linux as a daily driver.

July 25, 2022 at 06:58 pm - Permalink

Since this topic became hot again lately, I would like point possibly interested users to the thread about running Igor Pro under Wine (which I am not doing btw.):

https://www.wavemetrics.com/forum/general/igor-linux-using-wine

Would be interesting to hear if someone has an update on how things run using the latest Igor / Wine combo. I guess instead of porting Igor to Linux, which seems like an enormous task for a small team, a viable compromise would be to get Igor working well in a Wine (or similar) environment.

July 26, 2022 at 12:05 am - Permalink

Igor 9 in my lab is running on a bunch of old (2010) Mac Pros under MacOS 10.13, and there's no way I would upgrade to more recent and much less flexible MacOS. This is why we are all stuck with these fairly old machines and OS, with graphics cards dying one by one. Buying new macs or switching to windows is out the question for many reasons. The only option is moving everything to Linux, and right now run Igor on wine. How much simpler it would be if it could run directly in Linux ! I'd be very excited to test a new version, and would probably contribute a few new users to that new version.

November 15, 2022 at 08:02 am - Permalink

Dear Igor team,

would you be able to comment on the possibility of providing Igor say as a flatpak in the near future for Linux?

July 20, 2023 at 12:49 am - Permalink

Konstantin.Hirsch wrote:

Dear Igor team,

would you be able to comment on the possibility of providing Igor say as a flatpak in the near future for Linux?

We would need a Linux version of the application before the issue of how to package it was relevant. Maybe that would happen in the "near future" in geologic time but probably not in your intended time frame.

July 21, 2023 at 04:55 am - Permalink