Setting library path on Windows 10

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1

Dear all,

I followed the instructions here using MSYS2 option and successfully installed the latest MRtrix3 on Windows 10. But when I test mrview it says it can’t find the libraries. The path to libraries is on the $PATH. Please see the attached screenshot.

mrviewLibraries.png2736×1824 131 KB

Could you please let me know what I am missing?
Thanks so much!
Nagesh

2

That is strange…

  1. Can you ls -la /c/MRTrix3/mrtrix3/release/lib just to confirm that the library file is still there and non-empty?
  2. Do you still get the same problem after a python build clean; python build?
  3. Unless anyone else can spot a problem, I’d try re-installing to a different directory that doesn’t contain any uppercase characters, just on the (exceptionally unlikely) chance that those are causing an issue.
3

I tried the first two on your list and still the problem persists. See the screenshot.
I am going to try three now and will report back.

Thanks Robert.
Nagesh

4

mrviewLibraries2.png2736×1824 239 KB

Sorry forgot to attach!

5

Very strange. Only other things I can think of are to run:

ldd `which mrview`

, and to copy&paste the contents of your release/config file (use the [code] trick described here to help keep the post neat).

6

Wow. The third option of reinstalling without capital letters in the folder-name worked! Thanks Robert.

mrviewWorks.png2736×1824 135 KB

7

I am stunned this would fix it… Unless the issue was related to white spaces in the PATH…?

Having just had a go at this myself yesterday, I think the instructions will need to be updated… I had to invoke:

$ PATH=/c/mingw64/bin:$PATH CFLAGS=-I/c/mingw64/include/eigen3 ./configure

before it would build properly, and then hit the same issue with the library. My fix to that was to copy the release/lib/mrtrix-0.3.X.dll over to release/bin, which I think is a cleaner solution on the long run. We could easily modify the build script to set the target part for the library to be in the bin folder on Windows, which would avoid this issue.

It’s annoying that I had to set the PATH and CFLAGS manually though, anyone else found this necessary…? I’m guessing the CFLAGS one could be avoided if pkg-config was included in the list of dependencies. No idea why the PATH wasn’t set properly from the outset though. This was a fresh MSYS2 install, by the way, just ran update-core, pacman -Syu, then the instructions on our wiki…

8

I am stunned this would fix it… Unless the issue was related to white spaces in the PATH…?

Me too. Windows paths inevitably contain whitespaces, and in this case there are no whitespaces before the MRtrix paths, so I don’t think it’s that. I’m curious to know if somewhere during configure / build there’s a lowercase conversion going on.

My fix to that was to copy the release/lib/mrtrix-0.3.X.dll over to release/bin, which I think is a cleaner solution on the long run.

As in, you had added both release/bin and release/lib to the path as per the instructions and it didn’t work, then you copied the .dll to release/bin and it did work? Or did you not add release/lib to your path? Either way, I’d be happy with the suggested alternative.

9

OK, I hadn’t added anything to the PATH… my mistake.

Still, I like to be able to invoke commands by their full path, which can come in handy when testing, etc. Moving the DLL over to the bin folder means it works out of the box. It’s a pretty simple change, I think we should do it.

10

From a completely fresh MSYS2 installation, I was able to configure, build and run without any issues, using just this (copied literally from the very first entries of my .bash_history):

Open MinGW-w64 Win64 Shell and run:

update-core

Close and open MinGW-w64 Win64 Shell and run:

pacman -Su
pacman -S git python pkg-config mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-eigen3 mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5
git clone https://github.com/MRtrix3/mrtrix3.git
cd mrtrix3
./configure
./build
echo "export PATH=$(pwd)/release/bin:$(pwd)/release/lib:$(pwd)/scripts:\$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
mrinfo -version

Note that this corresponds exactly to the instructions in the documentation.

@jdtournier: the pkg-config package is already included in the docs, so it should just all works fine without too much hassle.

PS: msys2 was installed in its default directory without any spaces (this is recommended against) and I ran everything from the home directory provided by msys2

11

I tested using capitals in a directory outside the msys2 homedir, and it all works out perfectly fine. So something else must have been different on the second go…

12

OK, it seems the issue was that I was using the MSYS2 shell, not the MinGW-w64 shell as clearly stated in the docs… Everything does indeed run fine when following the instructions to the letter…

13

Thank you Donald and Ben for testing this and updating the instructions and such.
I typically do try to follow the instructions to the letter but somehow I missed this one but all is good now :slight_smile:
Thanks again tremendously!