Installation

This is a brief overview of installation instructions for people who are fairly comfortable installing things on their systems. More detailed instructions for MacOS, Linux, and Windows 10 are also available. Further, part of the beauty of brute force computing is that you can pay for cloud computing to run your code if you do not have a cluster. If you want to do this you should see the optional installation instructions for AWS.

Note R version 4.0 and up causes the R package Rniftilib to fail. I replaced this with the package RNifti. If you run into any issues with the latest version of neuropointillist, report the issue and try (if you can) backtrack to an older version of R and use the Pre-AWS release, installing Rniftilib as below.

You will need the R packages RNifti, argparse, doParallel and reticulate to be installed.

argparse requires Python version >= 2.7 and Python packages argparse.

If you need to install Rniftilib to support an older neuropointillist release, you will need to get it from an archive as follows.

install.packages("http://ascopa.server4you.net/ubuntu/ubuntu/pool/universe/r/r-cran-rniftilib/r-cran-rniftilib_0.0-35.r79.orig.tar.xz", repos=NULL)

Once all prerequisites are installed and you have pulled the neuropointillist repository, locally install the package. To do this, cd into the repository. You will have a neuropointillist subdirectory. Start R and type

install.packages("neuropointillist", repos=NULL, type="source")

If you are planning to do development on the R package, it might help to have the R package devtools. If you are actually doing development, you should also install the R package roxygen2.

devtools depends on the Debian package libcurl4-openssl-dev, so you might need a system administrator to make sure that is installed. If you have installed devtools, you can locally install the package as follows.

library(devtools)
install("neuropointillist")

! Note that neuropointillist requires R version >= 3.2.3

Make sure that the repository directory which contains the R scripts npointillist and npointrun is in your path.