Ovito is a great tool to visualize atoms from molecular dynamics simulations and to perform some statistical analysis on the data. The tool is an alternative to other similar tools such as VMD and ParaView.

[caption id=”attachment_834” align=”aligncenter” width=”640”]Ovito The main window of Ovito in the newest version.[/caption]

The current version of Ovito in the Ubuntu repositories (version 0.9.2) is sadly very outdated. Even though you of course may download the latest version from Ovito’s webpages and install it locally in your home folder, I often find it better to get a newer package version.

At the Computational Physics group’s PPA I have now uploaded the latest build of Ovito for Ubuntu in a package that will automatically replace the current Ovito version. Note that this is not a release version of Ovito, but the latest version fetched from Ovito’s sources (currently nicknamed 1.1.1.90). The reason is that Ovito’s creator, Alexander Stukowski, was kind enough to implement a suggestion we proposed to change the default input handler for the viewports to be the orbit input handler. This behavior feels so much more natural and makes the already great Ovito application even better.

To install the latest version of Ovito, all you need to do is to open up a terminal and type these lines:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:comp-phys/stable
sudo apt-get install ovito

Note that the Computational Physics repository also contains newer versions of the Armadillo package, which will automatically be updated if you do not remove the repository after installing Ovito.