Meshroom and Meshlab on Ubuntu 18.04

[December 2019]

[Keywords: Meshroom, Alice, photogrammetry, Ubuntu, Linux, 64bit, VirtualBox]

This page will document my efforts to install Meshroom photogrammetry software on Ubuntu 18.04. For the purposes of this initial installation I will install on a guest instance of Ubuntu 18.04 in Virtualbox, hosted on an Ubuntu 18.04 desktop.

Meshroom Hardware Requirements

• See this : https://meshroom-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/requirements/requirements.html
• Regarding hardware, an Nvidia GPU is required (with Compute Capability of at least 2.0) for the dense high quality mesh generation. 32GB of RAM is recommended for the meshing, but you can adjust parameters if you don’t meet this requirement.
• For Linux installs, see this : https://meshroom-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/linux/linux.html

My system :

• OS : Ubuntu 18.04
• Hardware:
  • AMD Fx-8370 eight-core processor
  • 32 GB RAM
  • GeForce GT 730/PCIe/SSE2

Steps (Summary) :

This is a short list of the steps required to install Meshroom and get it running. See Details below for additional notes on each step.

1. Download the Meshroom 64-bit Linux binary from here: https://www.fosshub.com/Meshroom.html?dwl=Meshroom-2019.2.0-linux.tar.gz
2. Un-zip the binary
3. Done! (But see details for creating a launcher)

I did not find it necessary to make any of the other changes noted in the Linux install reference; simply double-clicking on the Meshroom program file was sufficient to start the program.

Detailed Steps :

Step 1 - download

An updated instance of Ubuntu 18.04 was created in VirtualBox 6.0.14. A current Guest Additions was installed in the Virtualbox instance. The Meshroom binary was downloaded into the Downloads directory in the home directory of the user login

Step 2 - un-zip

Using Archive Manager the binary is unzipped to a directory called Meshroom-2019.2.0 (of course this name will be different for different releases). A directory called Meshroom was created and the Meshroom-2019.2 directory was moved into it. Here is a directory listing:

Step 3 - create a launcher

[Note : Based on this reference : https://medium.com/@blomsmail/how-to-create-an-icon-launcher-for-ubuntu-616a197cb06a

Create the text file below, and save it to ~/.local/share/applications/meshroom.desktop.

Change "yourname" in the file to your home directory name. Adjust the Icon=, Path=, and Exec= lines for the version of Meshroom that you are using.

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Version=2019.2.0

Type=Application

Name=Meshroom

Icon=/home/yourname/Meshroom-2019.2.0/lib/meshroom/ui/img/meshroom.svg

Path=/home/yourname/Meshroom-2019.2.0/

Exec=/home/yourname/Meshroom-2019.2.0/Meshroom

StartupNotify=false

StartupWMClass="Meshroom", "Meshroom"

OnlyShowIn=Unity;GNOME;

X-UnityGenerated=true

Meshlab

Meshlab can be installed from the Ubuntu Software store, and run as any other installed application.