GNU/Linux is the recommended operating system of choice for demanding experimental setups and experimental paradigms. Linux, due to it being a true free software / open-source operating system provides us and you with a couple of advantages:
- Thanks to its open source nature and constant community development and peer review of its code-base, it generally exhibits less bugs as well as higher performance and robustness in areas of functionality that matter especially for demanding experimental paradigms, e.g., precision and robustness of timing, resource usage and efficiency. The system is also much more flexible and tweakable, should performance tuning and customization be neccessary for special experiment setups.
- The open access to its source code allows us to review the implementation of important low-level implementation details. This allows us to understand how and why the system behaves in a certain way and thereby allows us to implement a better low-level integration between Psychtoolbox and the operating system. Apple's OS X and Microsoft's Windows are mostly black boxes for us, leaving us with guess-work about many implementation details, which leads to suboptimal integration with Psychtoolbox.
- The open development process allows us to participate in the design, implementation, improvement and bug-fixing of crucial operating system components ourselves. We can help to fix and improve the underlying infrastructure and plumbing instead of having to resort to ugly and suboptimal hacks in Psychtoolbox itself to work around the unfixable flaws of a black box.
Very old and obsolete instructions for Linux are kept in
PsychtoolboxDownloadLinux for posterity. However, this is usually not what you want.
This works the same as on Windows or OSX, so follow the instructions on the main Download page. However, Psychtoolbox requires a few software libraries to be installed on your Linux system. The installer will tell you what kind of libraries you need to install, should some of them be missing. For the most simple way of installation, read on.
The most convenient way of installation if you use a Debian GNU/Linux system or a Debian derivative, e.g., Ubuntu Linux, is the
Neuro Debian repository of neuro-science software. It provides you with a large number of popular neuro-science related software packages, optimally configured for use on Debian and Ubuntu, with a convenient installation via the package management system of your Linux distribution. If you install the package octave-psychtoolbox-3, your system will be automatically configured and tuned for use with Psychtoolbox under GNU/Octave. If you prefer to run Psychtoolbox with Matlab, you can can run the function
DownloadAdditionsForNeuroDebian from within a Matlab running under Linux. It will install a few additional files needed to run Psychtoolbox with Matlab on Linux.
The Linux specific code in PTB is currently being developed and tested using
Ubuntu Linux provided by Canonical. We recommend this distribution because it is beginner friendly and constantly tested with Psychtoolbox. However, there is nothing wrong with other Linux distributions, so feel free to use them, but keep in mind we can only provide you with support for Ubuntu at the moment. See
UsingPsychtoolboxOnUbuntu for more details and instructions on Ubuntu Linux. Or
UsingPsychtoolboxOnFedora for Fedora.
With older Matlab versions execution of Screen() may lead to mex file errors. Often these errors arise from outdated versions of libz that come with the old Matlab. To get rid of this problem, delete or move all libz*.so* files in your Matlab/bin/glnx86.
