The Makefile.lammps file in this directory is used when building LAMMPS with its USER-VTK package installed. The file has several settings needed to compile and link LAMMPS with the VTK library. You should choose a Makefile.lammps.* file compatible with your system and your version of VTK, and copy it to Makefile.lammps before building LAMMPS itself. You may need to edit one of the provided files to match your system.

If you create a new Makefile.lammps file suitable for some version of VTK on some system, that is not a match to one of the provided Makefile.lammps.* files, you can send it to the developers, and we can include it in the distribution for others to use.

To illustrate, these are example settings from the Makefile.lammps.ubuntu14.04_vtk6 file:

vtk_SYSINC = -I/usr/include/vtk-6.0 vtk_SYSLIB = -lvtkCommonCore-6.0 -lvtkIOCore-6.0 -lvtkIOXML-6.0 -lvtkIOLegacy-6.0 -lvtkCommonDataModel-6.0 vtk_SYSPATH =

vtk_SYSINC refers to the include directory of the installed VTK library

vtk_SYSLIB refers to the libraries needed to link to from an application (LAMMPS in this case) to "embed" VTK in the application. VTK consists of multiple shared libraries which are needed when using the USER-VTK package.

vtk_SYSPATH = refers to the path (e.g. -L/usr/local/lib) where the VTK library can be found. You may not need this setting if the path is already included in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.