What's New on the ROOT Web Site


Version v2.23/10: the Holiday Release 17/12/99
A christmas and new year release for those who want to use the latest, greatest during the holidays. See the release notes for detailed information and download it.

The ROOT team would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy 2000.

New Version v2.23/09 Released 26/11/99
Barring major problems this will be the final 2.23 version. This new version fixes quite a number of small problems and introduces two major new features: SQL (MySQL) access and Feynman diagram drawing classes. See the release notes for detailed information. This version can be downloaded from the usual place.

Announcement: 2nd ROOT Users Workshop 23/11/99
After the very successful First ROOT Users Workshop in March 1999 at Fermilab we are happy to annouce the Second ROOT Users Workshop, ROOT 2000, to be held at CERN the 3rd, 4th and 5th of February 2000 (just a few days before CHEP 2000).

Trigger Control Software for CERES/NA45 18/11/99
Dariusz Miskowiec has written some very nice classes for controlling VME modules. His use of the ROOT GUI classes can be an inspiration for others.

CHEP2000 and Commercial use of ROOT 18/11/99
The organizers of the CHEP 2000 conference are organizing a track on technology transfer. For this they would like to receive papers/talks from people who use ROOT in a commercial or non-High Energy Physics/Nuclear Physics environment. Anybody interested should contact as soon as possible Fabrizio Gagliardi for more information. Padova and Venice are beautiful places in winter.

New Version v2.23/08 Released 2/11/99
We are zooming in on the final 2.23. This new version fixes a number of loose ends. See the release notes for detailed information and rush over to the download area.

New Version v2.23/07 Released 29/10/99
The new version is ready for download. This new version contains some important TTree performance enhancements. See the release notes for detailed information.

New ROOT Home Page 28/10/99
Welcome to the new ROOT home page. Besides an updated look including the new ROOT logo by Giuliana Carminati we try to provide the available information in a more clear and concise way. Also, we would like the home page to be a "portal" to anything happening in the ROOT world, i.e., announcements, example applications, tips & tricks, etc. will be put directly on the home page. Once the list gets too long the older items will overflow to the "Recent News" page.


October 21, 1999:

New Pre-release of ROOT version 2.23/06.

See the release notes for a detailed description of the changes.


October 13, 1999:

First Pre-release of ROOT version 2.23/04.

See the release notes for a detailed description of the changes.

the first stable development version of Root 2.23/04 is now available. Please read very carefully the following points. This new version has an important internal restructuring of the Root libraries. There are also many new features introduced with this version. We are asking your contribution to test this new version and give us feedback.

Binaries are available under AFS. New platforms are supported. See the list at http://root.cern.ch/root/Availability.html

Rene & Fons

NEW LIBRARY STRUCTURE

We have minimized libraries dependencies by: With the new structure, for example: The following picture shows all the Root libraries and their dependencies. All non-Core libs reference the Core library. Libs shown in green are dynamically loaded by the system when needed. http://root.cern.ch/root/html/gif/Root_Libs.gif

Some new abstract interfaces have been introduced and some changes(renaming) have been made in the existing abstract interfaces. http://root.cern.ch/root/html/gif/Root_Virtual.gif

The abstract classes are in the Core library.

These new abstract interfaces increase dramatically the overall modularity of the Root system. For example:

Due to these changes the interactive Root module (root.exe) is now only explicitely linked against a few libraries (to see this do on linux: ldd $ROOTSYS/bin/root.exe). There is even no need anymore to explicitely link against X11 libraries (even for you own apps). During the execution only the needed libs will be loaded, e.g. if you don't fit during your Root session you will never load the Minuit library or if you run in batch mode (-b option) you will not load any graphics libs.

IMPORTANT NEW FEATURES

BACKWARD INCOMPATIBILITIES

LINKING parameters

IBM AIX

Thanks to this restructuring, we are now able to provide the same structure on AIX as on the other Unix platforms. The old and big library libRoot.a has been split into several libs. See above remark about root-config to list the libs under AIX.

A complete list of all changes and improvements, bug fixes, etc. can be found in the release notes for version 2.23/04.


July 29, 1999:

Fermilab ROOT Educational Material Released.

The Fermilab ROOT support team has prepared a "ROOT Getting Started" guide and an "Introduction to ROOT" course. You can find this material at the Fermilab ROOT support web site.


July 28, 1999:

Release of ROOT version 2.22/10.

See the release notes for a detailed description of the changes.


June 9, 1999:

Now HowTo on using the GUI Classes.

This new HowTo summarizes most known sources of information and example code on how to use the ROOT GUI classes. Note the especially nice, and very well documented, example code by Dmitri Vassili from HADES.


June 4, 1999:

First Pre-release of ROOT version 2.22/04.

See the release notes for a detailed description of the changes.

A short summary of the most important changes is given below:


May 10, 1999:

First ALICE Mock Data Challenge Produces 7 TB ROOT DB in 7 days.

Read how the first ALICE Mock Data Challenge produced one of the largest OODB's in the world.


April 7, 1999:

Talks given at the First US HENP ROOT Users Workshop available.

The talks given at this workshop can be seen at http://RunIIComputing.fnal.gov/root/.


March 19, 1999:

Introduction of development version 2.21/08.

For the new features and bug fixes in this version see the release notes.

As soon as we are back from the ROOT workshop at FNAL next week, we will start a new development cycle with 2.22.

Since the full development team will attend this workshop, you may experience a slow response time in the following days.


February 18, 1999:

Introduction of development version 2.21/06.

For the new features and bug fixes in this version see the release notes.

This version now also supports TrueType fonts on AIX and has an interface to CERN's RFIO system (in binary versions currently only for Linux and HP versions).


December 18, 1998:

New ROOT version 2.20/06.

Version 2.20/06 has been released today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

This new version has also been stored in the AFS area under pro. The previous AFS version (2.00/13) is still available under old. See Status and Availability for more details on the AFS pathnames for the various machines. Version 2.00/13 will be kept until the next release of ROOT.

This new release includes a long list of tiny improvements and a few bug fixes. See the release notes for more details. The following is a summary of the main features of this new version.


December 9, 1998:

Introduction of new bug tracking system.

To be able to better handle the numerous problem reports and enhancement requests we've introduced a bug tracking system based on JitterBug. JitterBug is a web based bug tracking system. It was originally developed by the Samba Team to handle bug tracking, problem reports and queries from Samba users.

The bug tracking system allows you to follow your bug report as it is being processed by the ROOT team. Also you can check if a certain bug has already been reported and what its processing status is.


November 27, 1998:

Introduction of the development version.

We have slightly reorganized the Status and Availability pages.
We are introducing the development version 2.20.

During the development phase, we will introduce every few days new versions of the source tar file Each new development version will be stamped (eg, 2.20/01, 2.20/02, etc). This version will become the production version in one/two weeks. Once this version will be released, we will start the same process with a new development version labelled 2.21/00.

With the source, we also provide tar files for some systems. Please check the version numbers of tar files before downloading.


October 30, 1998:

New ROOT version 2.00/13.

Version 2.00/13 has been released today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

This new version has also been stored in the AFS area under pro. The previous AFS version (2.00/11) is still available under old. See Status and Availability for more details on the AFS pathnames for the various machines. Version 2.00/11 will be kept until the next release of ROOT.


October 12, 1998:

New ROOT version 2.00/12.

Version 2.00/12 has been released today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

This new version includes a long list of minor changes and bug fixes. In addition, it contains:

This new version has also been stored in the AFS area under pro. The previous AFS version (2.00/11) is still available under old. See Status and Availability for more details on the AFS pathnames for the various machines. Version 2.00/11 will be kept until the next release of ROOT.


August 28, 1998:

New rebuild of ROOT version 2.00/11.

Due to an unfortunate problem in merging our latest versions, one correction in TTree/TTreeFormula fixing the problems when drawing one element of an array was lost.

We have rebuilt the tar files for all systems this morning. Apologies if you had already transferred the new version.

When you run the new Root executable, you should see the date of 28 August not 27 August.

Thanks to Stephen Bailey who discovered the problem and reported it immediatly.


August 27, 1998:

New ROOT version 2.00/11.

Version 2.00/11 has been released today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

This version comes with several small changes and improvements:

We have modified several functions (see list in the release notes) where arguments of type char* are now const char*. The Root type Option_t (was a char) is now defined as const char. Please check your calling sequences. See also the remarks about the definition of the macro EXTERN and the new macro R__EXTERN.

This new version has also been stored in the AFS area under pro. The previous AFS version (2.00/09) is still available under old. See Status and Availability for more details on the AFS pathnames for the various machines. Version 2.00/09 will be kept until the next release of Root.


July 31, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

Version 2.00/10 has been released today. See release notes for a description of the changes.


June 29, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

Version 2.00/09 has been installed today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

Important note for AFS users. With this version 2.09, we are introducing a new directory tree under AFS, see the Availability page. The previous version 2.08 is kept under the old directories. The version 2.08 will still be kept for one week. Please move to this new version, which is fully backwards compatible. AFS users should define $ROOTSYS to point to:

/afs/cern.ch/na49/library.4/ROOT/v2.09/i386_linux2/root     for Redhat 4.2 gcc2.7
/afs/cern.ch/na49/library.4/ROOT/v2.09/i386_redhat50/root   for Redhat5.0 egcs
/afs/cern.ch/na49/library.4/ROOT/v2.09/hp700_ux90/root      for Hpux9.05 CC
/afs/cern.ch/na49/library.4/ROOT/v2.09/hp700_ux102/root     for Hpux10.20 CC
/afs/cern.ch/na49/library.4/ROOT/v2.09/hp700_ux102_aCC      for Hpux10.20 aCC
/afs/cern.ch/na49/library.4/ROOT/v2.09/rs_aix41/root        for Aix4 xlC
/afs/cern.ch/na49/library.4/ROOT/v2.09/sun4m_53/root        for Solaris5.6 CC

With this new version, the RootHtmlDoc file has also been updated.


June 5, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

Version 2.00/08 has been installed today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

The version 2.00/08 has also been introduced under AFS for HP-UX 9/10, AIX, Linux and Solaris, see the Availability page.


May 19, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

Version 2.00/07 has been installed today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

We had to introduce this new version shortly after 2.00/06 to cure a few unexpected problems. Apologies if you imported 2.00/06.

Solaris users: Note that we are now compiling ROOT under Solaris 5.6. We tested that this version also works on Solaris 5.4 systems.

The version 2.00/07 has also been introduced under AFS for HP-UX 9/10, AIX, Linux and Solaris, see the Availability page.

With this new version, the RootHtmlDoc file has also been updated.


May 15, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

Version 2.00/06 has been installed today. See release notes for a description of the changes.


April 25, 1998:

ROOT has been ported to the KAI KCC compiler.

ROOT compiles now also under the KAI KCC compiler. A pre-compiled version for SGI can be downloaded, see the Availability page.


April 22, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

A new version 2.00/05 has been installed today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

The version 2.00/05 has also been introduced under AFS for HP-UX 9/10, AIX, Linux and Solaris, see the Availability page.


April 17, 1998:

The ROOT Cheat Sheet

Steve Beach has written a very useful "quick guide to ROOT in a question and answer format". Also available via the Publications page.


April 9, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

A new version 2.00/04 has been installed today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

The version 2.00/04 has also been introduced under AFS for HP-UX 9/10, AIX, Linux and Solaris, see the Availability page.

A new binary distribution has been introduced for Linux under Redhat 5.0


March 28, 1998:

New Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

A new version 2.00/03 has been installed today. See release notes for a description of the changes.

The version 2.00/03 has been introduced under AFS for HPUX9,10,aCC AIX, Linux and Solaris.


March 17, 1998:

Second Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

A new version 2.00/01 has been installed today. The new version has been generated for WindowsNT and Windows95 without the utility h2root. This version should fix several small problems reported with version 2.00/00. A new version of CINT (5.13.44) is also included. See release notes for a description of the changes. In particular a problem with the new GUI on 64 bit Alpha's has been fixed.


March 10, 1998:

First Beta of ROOT version 2.00.

We are happy to announce the first beta release of ROOT v2.00. For downloading the new version see Status & Availability. The main features of this new version are described on the version info page. The most notable new features are: The new GUI classes rely on the, de-facto standard Xpm library. The most current version of this library is included in all ROOT distributions except for Linux. RedHat 4.2 and higher support natively the correct libXpm.so. Some older Slackware distributions, however,  have an incompatible libXpm.so (XpmFree is undefined). For those systems download this libXpm.so and put it (after unzipping) as /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4.9.

Enjoy! And don't forget to give feedback.


January 26, 1998:

Announcing GH2ROOT

Gh2root is a Fortran program that generates automatically C++ code corresponding to the Geant3 structures JSET, JVERTX, JKINE, JHITS and JDIGI. For more details see the gh2root page.

It is our intention to extend this code generator in such a way that a Geant3 based application could be completly controlled from a C++/ROOT based interface.

Note that if some member functions of the class XRun are Geant3 specific, all the other functions can also be used in a non-Geant3 based Monte-Carlo.


December 19, 1997:

ATLFast++, the ATLAS fast MonteCarlo program based on ROOT is now available. For more details see the ATLFast++ page.

ATLFast++ is an interesting application that shows how to use several important facets of the ROOT system:

December 17, 1997:

Final ROOT Version 1.03 Released (version tag 1.03/09)

The ROOT team is happy to announce the final release of version 1.03 of the ROOT system. For downloading the new version see Status & Availability. The main features of this new version are described on the version info page. The new year will start with version 1.04.

The libraries on AFS have also been updated.

The ROOT team whishes you A Merry Christmas and a Happy and Successful 1998.


December 8, 1997:

Added link to the Rosebud Analysis Package used by theTAPS detector at GANIL

The Rosebud Analysis Package uses ROOT as its backbone. For other examples of ROOT usage see the ROOT Application page.


December 1, 1997:

Publication of "Questions & Answers" related to the comparison paper published Nov. 26

Read our answers to some common questions and comments concerning the performance comparison paper we published a few days ago.


November 26, 1997:

First comparison between ROOT, Objectivity/DB and LHC++ histOOgrams

Read the paper describing this first comparison.


November 25, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.03/08

See version 1.03/08 development notes.


November 14, 1997:

Documentation Update

Thanks to Nenad Buncic, a new version of the following documentation files has been generated: All these files available from the Availability page.


November 8, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.03/07

See version 1.03/07 development notes.

HTML pages have been regenerated and correspond to this new version.


October 20, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.03/05

See version 1.03/05 development notes.


October 6, 1997:

First three parts of ROOT tutorial made available

Release of first set of ROOT tutorials. Although this material is still quite rough and will be modified a lot coming months, it gives a more sequential overview of the ROOT system than the web site can provide.


September 10, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.03/03

See version 1.03/03 development notes.


September 4, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.03/02

See version 1.03/02 development notes. See also the new HOWTO on how to use the new TNetFile facility.


August 22, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.03/01

See version 1.03/01 development notes.


August 14, 1997:

PostScript files and html documentation corresponding to version 1.02 are now available

See Documentation in Postscript and HTML Format.


July 28, 1997:

Final ROOT Version 1.02 Released (version tag 1.02/00)

The ROOT team is happy to announce the release of version 1.02 of the ROOT system. For downloading the new version see Status & Availability. The main features of this new version are described on the version info page. The most notable new features are:

July 28, 1997:

CINT Version 5.13/19 Released

See CINT the C/C++ Interpreter on how to get the latest version of CINT.

Notice: ROOT v1.02 still runs with CINT v5.13.17. The new development version ROOT v1.03 will be released with the new CINT early September.


July 8, 1997:

Introduction of a powerful search engine

Using the search engine it is possible to search the "Complete Web Site" or, individually the "RootTalk Digest", the "Reference Guide" or the "Source Files".


July 3, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.01/07

See version 1.01/07 development notes.


June 17, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.01/06

See version 1.01/06 development notes.


June 4, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.01/04

See version 1.01/04 development notes.


June 2, 1997:

CINT Version 5.13/11 Released

See CINT the C/C++ Interpreter on how to get the latest version of CINT.


May 26, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.01/03

See version 1.01/03 development notes.


May 6, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.01/01

See version 1.01/01 development notes.

Thanks to Pasha Murat from the CDF collaboration at FNAL, the version 1.01/01 compiled with g++ is now available for SGI IRIX5.3.


May 2, 1997:

Introduction of the development version 1.01/00

Today we've introduced the development version 1.01 (see Status and Availability page) in addition to the released version 1.00. We intend to keep version 1.00/10 stable, unless we discover a major bug.

The version 1.01 development notes are also available. We intend to update version 1.01 at regular intervals. We do not guarantee to have the export files ready for all supported machines. The two important things in 1.01 are:

A new HOWTO(How to Fit histograms or data points) is now available.


April 25, 1997:

Final ROOT Version 1.00 Released (version tag 1.00/10)

The ROOT team is happy to announce the release of version 1.00 of the ROOT system (version tag 1.00/10). For downloading the new version see Status & Availability. The main features of this new version are described on the version info page.

On the Availability page, note the following:

In the coming days, we intend to work again on the documentation, new HOWTOs, tutorials, etc. Stay tuned!

We would like to thank the many people who have sent comments, suggestions and bug reports. Please, keep doing so.

Verson 1.00 is only the beginning. Still a lot needs to be done. Read about our plans and let us know if you think something needs to be added. We are now heading for version 2.00.


April 18, 1997:

Introduction of the Second Beta (version 1.00/08)

Today we've released the second beta of version 1.00 of the ROOT system. A summary of the changes has been posted to the roottalk mailing list (see the digest of the mailing list). For downloading of the new version see Status & Availability.


April 5, 1997:

Introduction of the First Beta (version 1.00/07)

The ROOT team is happy to announce the beta release of version 1.00 of the ROOT system. For downloading the new version see Status & Availability. The main features of this new version are described on the version info page. The sources are also available.

Please test this new version and report problems or suggestions as soon as possible. We still have to include a few additions before the final release scheduled for end of April.

A summary of the main features will be posted later. Note a backward incompatibility with respect to version 0.9 in the way TTree branches are defined. The test program Event and macros eventa and eventb have been modified accordingly.

Next week, we are presenting the ROOT Input/Output subsystem to the CHEP97 conference in Berlin. The tar files including the slides and also the ROOT macro generating these slides can be found (from Tuesday 8) at CHEP97 slides.


March 17, 1997:

Digest of roottalk Mailing List Available via ROOT Home Page

A sorted and hyperized version of the digest of the roottalk mailing list is now available via the ROOT home page.


March 7, 1997:

The ALICE Collaboration Adopts ROOT as Physics Analysis Framework

The ALICE LHC collaboration decided today to adopt the ROOT framework as basis for its physics analysis infrastructure. With this move ALICE joins the NA49, PHOBOS and FINUDA collaborations in adopting ROOT in one or more key areas of their data handling chain. ROOT is currently being employed in all areas of HEP research, i.e. by on-line, off-line and theory groups.


January 15, 1997:

Dedicated ROOT Mailing List roottalk Created

We've created a mailing list dedicated to the ROOT system. You are invited to join this mailing list to discuss all aspects of the system. Important announcements, like new releases, bug fixes, discussion of new developments, etc. will be made via this list. We, the ROOT developers and Masaharu Goto the CINT C/C++ interpreter developer, are actively following the discussions on the list. To subscribe, send a mail to majordomo@root.cern.ch with as message body: Your mail address is optional. You will be automatically subscribed to the list if you use our user registration page.


January 14, 1997:

ROOT Version 0.90/12 Released

The ROOT team is happy to announce the release of version 0.9 of the ROOT system. For downloading the new version see Status & Availability. The main features of this new version are described on the version info page. The most notable new features are: ATTENTION: due to major optimizations in the database and histogram classes version 0.9 can not read files created with ROOT v0.8 or lower. It is unlikely that we will change the file format between now and version 1.0, but only from version 1.0 onwards will we guarantee full backward compatability. We are sorry for any inconveniences, but we don't want to start carrying legacy bagage before version 1.0.

We hope you will have fun working with ROOT and welcome any suggestions, comments and bug reports.


December 20, 1996:

ROOT Available for SGI IRIX 5.3

Finally we have a version of ROOT for the SGI. This version has been compiled using CC on an SGI running IRIX 5.3.


December 4, 1996:

ROOT Version 0.9/09 Pre-release

We are introducing a pre-release v0.9 of the ROOT system. The final v0.9 release is expected to appear early January 1997. See Status and Availability on how to get this latest version and version info on the changes since the previous version. Version 0.9 for Windows/NT will only be available later in the week of December 9 (hopefully already Monday in the evening).

The AFS files are still version 0.8, they will only be changed once the final release has been made.

ATTENTION: if you have been using version 0.8 or earlier you must replace the ROOTDIR environment variable by ROOTSYS and remove all other ROOT related variables, like ROOTLIB and ROOTSRC.


September 19, 1996:

ROOT Version 0.8/04 Update

A few minor problems have been fixed in the binary files. The fixes have been implemented on the WEB distribution files and also on the AFS files.

September 1, 1996:

ROOT Version 0.8 Released

We are happy to announce the release of v0.8 of the ROOT system. The main features of this new version are: Libraries and executables are available for a large variety of Unix platforms, Windows/NT and Windows95. See Status and Availability on how to get this latest version and version info on the changes since the previous version.


August 26, 1996:

CINT Version 5.10 Released

See CINT the C/C++ Interpreter on how to get the latest version of CINT.


June 13, 1996:

CINT Version 5.8 Released

See CINT the C/C++ Interpreter on how to get the latest version of CINT.


June 4, 1996:

Several WEB Pages Updated. PostScript version of Documentation Now Available

The following chapters are new in the ROOT home page: The chapter The Object I/O System has been updated to reflect the introduction of the new Streamer() function.

Note that the existing WEB pages describe our coming version 0.8. We expect to release this new version end of June.


April 16, 1996:

Version 0.07 Now Available on Most Unix Systems and Windows/NT

Version 0.07 of the ROOT SDK has been released today. This new version features the CINT C++ interpreter for command line and macro interpretation. However, v0.07 is a hybrid version that still depends on the old dictionary generated by the dict program for its run-time type information. We are working hard to remove this dependence (for v0.08). See Status and Availability on how to get this latest version and version info on the changes since the previous version. Still missing SGI (the SGI binaries are subject to the availability of a decent machine to compile and link).

The new set of tutorials based on our new full C++ interpreter is available in the tutorials section.

We intend to provide in the coming days the complete ROOT html tree as one or a few PostScript files. Stay tuned!


March 25, 1996:

Give Feedback to the ROOT Team Via the New Bug Report and Feedback Forms

It is now possible to submit bug reports and/or comments on ROOT via the bug report form or to give feedback on the ROOT web site. These links are now accessible via the ROOT Home Page.


February 28, 1996:

ROOT Version 0.06b1 for HP-UX Now Available

Version 0.06b1 of ROOT for HP-UX has been released today. See Status and Availability on how to get this latest version. Also available is a small but non trivial program that shows how to use the new TTree class.


February 21, 1996:

CINT Version 5.4 Released

See CINT the C/C++ Interpreter on how to get CINT.


February 14, 1996:

Monday 19 February, 16:00, CN Amphi: Presentation of CINT, a C/C++ interpreter, by M. Goto.

The CINT C++ interpreter is currently being integrated into ROOT.


February 5, 1996:

ROOT Version 0.05 Released

Version 0.05 of ROOT has been released today. See Status and Availability on how to get this latest version.


November 29, 1995:

ROOT Version 0.04 Released

Version 0.04 of the ROOT system has been released after the first public presentation.

First Public Presentation of ROOT at CERN


Rene Brun, Fons Rademakers
Last update 9/6/99 by FR