As mentioned in the installing ROOT page [6], ROOT 6 is not yet available on all the platforms ROOT used to be supported. In particular we lack a Windows build.
One solution to overcome this problem is to run ROOT 6 in a virtual machine. The purpose of this page is to explain how to do this using CernVM and Oracle VirtualBox, a virtualization software freely available for all the major platforms.
Installing Oracle VirtualBox
Oracle VirtualBox [7] can be downloaded for installation from the official VirtualBox download page [8]. Many systems may have it available in the package repository.
Getting CernVM
CernVM [9] is a virtual appliance developed specifically for the LHC use case. CernVM is contextualizable to specific needs via the CernVM-online portal. However, for the case of ROOT6, an OVA bundle package can be download containing a contextualized image with auto-login and an added a module file to setup the environment for ROOT 6, creating a desktop icon for ROOT 6 and changing the default ROOT button in the panel for the ROOT 6 one.
The bundle can be downloaded from here: ROOT6.ova [10] . The first time, open the OVA package to automatically start the process of import in VirtualBox. You can increase the number of CPUs (default 1) and the memory (default 1024 MB) assigned to the machine. It is also possible to share a local folder in R/W mode with the virtual machine to simplify file transfer. The following times the machine can be run directly from VirtualBox.
By clicking on the desktop icon a terminal window running the ROOT shell pops-up. ROOT can also be run from any open terminal. The ROOT distribution and gcc 4.8.1 are taken from /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch/lcg/dev/ where symlinks to the latest versions are defined.