News

29 July 2012: MacOS 10.8 (Mountain Lion) has arrived, and Regina works out of the box. However, since none of us are Apple registered developers, Mountain Lion might quarantine Regina and refuse to start it. To fix this, control-click on Regina and select Open, and you will be given an option to tell your machine that this application is safe.

30 May 2012: Version 4.93 is out! This is the version that will be presented at CG Week 2012. It adds one-click unknot recognition, veering structures, exports to Matveev's recogniser, Python improvements, and more. You can read more about what's new, or go ahead and download the new version.

12 April 2012: Version 4.92 is out: MacOS X users now have a simple drag-and-drop install, and there is now a version for Windows! Of course, GNU/Linux users are still well-supported as always. This version introduces fundamental normal surfaces, boundary slopes for spun-normal surfaces, and more; see the highlights here.

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What is Regina?

Other highlights of Regina include angle structures, census enumeration, combinatorial recognition of triangulations, and high-level tasks such as 3-sphere recognition and connected sum decomposition. Regina comes with a full graphical user interface, and also offers Python bindings and a low-level C++ programming interface.

See the users' handbook for a full list of features.

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Screenshots

	Studying 3-manifold triangulations
	Normal surfaces and angle structures
	In-built Python scripting

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Download

MacOS X

Mountain Lion (10.8) users may be unable to start Regina because it is “from an unidentified developer” (none of us are registered with Apple). Control-click on Regina and select Open, and you will be given an option to tell your machine that this application is safe.

MacOS Version		Installer
Mountain Lion (10.8) Lion (10.7) Snow Leopard (10.6) on modern 64-bit machines		Download
Snow Leopard (10.6) on older 32-bit machines Leopard (10.5)		Download

Most Snow Leopard users should be able to run the 64-bit Lion package. If your machine is very old, you might get an error message ‘You can't open the application "Regina" because it is not supported on this architecture’. In this case, you can run the 32-bit Leopard package instead.

Windows

Windows Version		Installer
Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows XP (see below)		Download

On some Windows XP machines, Regina will not start (“The application failed to initialize properly ...”). The problem seems to be an obscure missing DLL, and the error message is spectacularly unhelpful; one known solution is to install Python 2.x from python.org.

GNU/Linux

To keep the installation simple, most packages do not include the MPI (high-performance computing) utilities. If you need these, let Ben know and he can build you an MPI-enabled package.

Distribution		Version	32-bit package (i386 or i586)	64-bit package (amd64 or x86_64)
Debian		6.0 (squeeze)	Install	Install
		unstable (sid)	Install	Install
Fedora		17	Download	Download
		16	Download	Download
		15	Download	Download
		14	Download	Download
Mandriva		2011.0	Download	Download
		2010.2	Download	Download
		2010.1	Download	Download
openSUSE		12.1	Download	Download
		11.4	Download	Download
		11.3	Download	Download
Ubuntu		12.04 LTS (precise)	Install	Install
		11.10 (oneiric)	Install	Install
		11.04 (natty)	Install	Install
		10.10 (maverick)	Install	Install
		10.04 LTS (lucid)	Install	Install

If your system is not in this table, you will need to build Regina from source. You can download the source code here. Please see the separate page on building Regina for instructions on how to build Regina and what libraries and tools you will need to have installed.

If you run into any problems when you run Regina, you can check the troubleshooting page to see if your problem is discussed there. You also most welcome to contact us for help.

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Documentation

Users' Handbook

You can read the handbook from within Regina by selecting Help → Regina Handbook from the menu. You can also read it here online.

Python/C++ API Documentation

You can read the API documentation by selecting Help → Python API Reference from the menu. You can also read it here online.

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What's new in version 4.93 (May 2012)?

Features

• Implements solid torus recognition, and by corollary unknot recognition. The necessary tools were already there, but this rolls them into a single "one-click" procedure.
• Identifies which taut angles structures are veering structures.
• Adds the Weeks manifold to the list of example triangulations that you can construct.
• Exports triangulations in a text format that can be passed to Matveev's 3-manifold recogniser software.

User Interface

• Restored File → Save and Save As to the menu. These were missing in version 4.92.
• The old Surfaces tab in the triangulation viewer is now the Recognition tab, and combines exact high-level algorithms with "opportunistic" combinatorial recognition.

Python

• Python consoles now set the variable "item" to the currently selected packet in the tree, not "selected". This is easier to type, and avoids the misconception that changing the selection afterwards will change the variable (it doesn't). If nothing is selected, Regina will now explicitly set item=None.
• All use of NTriBool is gone from the classes NTriangulation and NNormalSurface. Tests such as NNormalSurface::isOrientable() and NTriangulation::hasCompressingDisc() now return an ordinary boolean that you can test in the natural way in Python.

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Highlights from version 4.92 (April 2012)

Installation

• MacOS users now have a simple drag-and-drop install. If you want, you can now get rid of fink.
• Windows users can install Regina! This is also a simple point-and-click install.
• Linux users have far fewer dependencies than before: Regina is now based on Qt only, and does not use anything from KDE.

User Interface

• The user interface has continued its overhaul, with many more usability improvements.
• Regina now uses many small windows instead of one monolithic window. You can return to the “old way” via Regina's settings if you prefer.

Features

• You can now enumerate all fundamental normal surfaces, as well as all vertex normal surfaces. See arXiv:1111.7055 for the algorithms.
• Face pairing graphs now have labels for tetrahedron numbers.
• You can now see boundary slopes for spun normal surfaces; thanks to William Pettersson and Stephan Tillmann.
• There is now experimental support for transversely oriented normal surfaces. Again, thanks to Will and Stephan.

Python

• All python sessions now execute “from regina import *” by default. For regina-python, you can disable this by passing --noautoimport.

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Announcement Mailing List

There are other mailing lists for user support and development; click here for details.

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Authors and License

Many others have been of assistance with this project, be it through time, knowledge, testing or code. Please see the full list of acknowledgements in the users' handbook.

Citation

Benjamin A. Burton, Ryan Budney, William Pettersson, et al.,
Regina: Software for 3-manifold topology and normal surface theory,
http://regina.sourceforge.net/, 1999–2012.

Copying & modification

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Detailed License

For complete license details, including the full GNU General Public License and information on external software that Regina uses, see the full license in the users' handbook.

Project Hosting

We are grateful to SourceForge.net for hosting this project on their servers.

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Contact / Comments / Suggestions

If you have written your own extensions that you think could be worth putting in the main release, please do write and let us know.

Even if you have no comments to make, it's always nice to hear from people using Regina, even if it's just to say hi. We're always interested to hear how this software is being used.

You can contact us by email: the best address is regina-user@lists.sourceforge.net, which will reach all of the developers. Of course you are also welcome to send us personal emails: our websites are linked to our names in the author list above.

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