How To Install povray on Ubuntu

Posted on April 1, 2023 (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )

3 minutes • 459 words

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install povray on Ubuntu.

What is `povray`

povray is:

POV-Ray is a full-featured ray tracer. Ray tracers simulate objects and light sources of the real world to calculate photorealistic, computer generated images. Because of the nature of ray tracing, this process is quite CPU-intensive, at the benefit of more realistic images compared to real time rendering techniques. For example, in POV-Ray, you can model a glass prism, and you will see a spectrum in the resulting image.

POV-Ray by itself is a command-line utility that will take scene descriptions, written in a special easy-to-understand language, to produce ray-traced images (or even a sequence of images, for animations). You can either write those scene-descriptions by hand, or use external tools to generate (parts of) the scene.

povray-includes is highly recommended in addition to this package.

There are three methods to install povray on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install povray Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install povray using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install povray

Install povray Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install povray using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install povray

Install povray Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install povray using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install povray

How To Uninstall povray on Ubuntu

To uninstall only the povray package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove povray

Uninstall povray And Its Dependencies

To uninstall povray and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove povray

Remove povray Configurations and Data

To remove povray configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge povray

Remove povray configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove povray configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge povray

Dependencies

povray have the following dependencies:

References

povray website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install povray package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.