Me, Myself and I

Nvidia PhysX formerly known as Ageia PhysX is an excellent physics engine which can benefit from hardware acceleration if you have an “PhysX” card in your machine, but it does well in “software” mode too.

On Windows the installation is pretty straightforward so I won’t go into that, but on Linux you have to do a little hand work after to get it work.

So first I grabbed the PhysX_2.8.1_SDK_CoreLinux_deb.tar.gz file from here .

After un-tarring the package, i got a “few” debian packages. Well now the “installation” order counts so the best is to give a command like inside the folder where you extracted the debs:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Once that is done, you will see that you are not able to run any of those samples included, because it cannot find the shared libraries (at least not under Ubuntu).

It installs the shared objects to /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/ so we need to do three symbolic links to /usr/lib in order to make this work.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libNxCharacter.so.1 /usr/lib/libNxCharacter.so.1

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libNxCooking.so.1 /usr/lib/libNxCooking.so.1

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/PhysX/v2.8.1/libPhysXCore.so.1 /usr/lib/libPhysXCore.so.1

With this done we can check out the installed samples in /usr/sbin/PhysX_Samples_2.8.1_FC4/Bin/linux …

Well this is it … and Happy Coding