Prerequisites

PWTK is written in pure Tcl and uses Standard Tcl library (tcllib). To aid the installation on HPC supercomputers, PWTK comes with the needed parts of Tcllib included. It is recommended to also install tcl-tclreadline and tcl-thread packages.

How to install required Tcl packages in GNU/Linux

For Debian-based linux distros:

sudo apt install tcl tcllib tcl-tclreadline tcl-thread

For Fedora-based linux distros:

sudo dnf install tcl tcllib tcl-tclreadline tcl-thread

(Note: tcl-tclreadline is required for the interactive prompt and tcl-thread to use threads.)

It is also recommended to install a few more packages that PWTK uses.
For Debian-based distros:

sudo apt install openbabel gnuplot-qt imagemagick wget xcrysden

For Fedora-based distros (no xcrysden here):

sudo dnf install openbabel gnuplot ImageMagick wget

Installing PWTK

No compilation is required. Just download and untar the tarball, and add the location of the PWTK package (its root directory) to your PATH. For example, to install PWTK to /opt, do:

cd /tmp
wget http://pwtk.ijs.si/download/pwtk-3.0.tar.gz
cd /opt
sudo tar zxvf /tmp/pwtk-3.0.tar.gz


Then open the ~/.bashrc file with editor (say emacs) and add the following snippet:

export PATH=/opt/pwtk-3.0:$PATH

Configuring PWTK

It is a good idea to configure the PWTK (at least minimally). Default configuration files are located in PWTK's config/ subdirectory. These can be used as templates that a user can copy into the $HOME/.pwtk/ directory and modify them as she/he finds fit.

The main user configuration file is $HOME/.pwtk/pwtk.tcl. A template for this file is available in the PWTK's config/ subdirectory, i.e., either config/pwtk.tcl or config/pwtk_simple.tcl. Copy one of this files into your $HOME/.pwtk/pwtk.tcl file and edit it according to your needs.

If the Quantum ESPRESSO executables are not on your PATH, you can inform PWTK of their location by uncommenting or adding the bin_dir specs in the $HOME/.pwtk/pwtk.tcl file, i.e.:

bin_dir /path/to/QE/executables

For further info about configuration, see section 3 Customizing the PWTK of the PWTK Short Guide.