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FreeSurfer Download

FreeSurfer for Linux is distributed in the form of a .tar.gz file, and is installed from the terminal command-line.

The Mac OS X FreeSurfer distribution is a .dmg file. If using the Safari web browser, a GUI is automatically opened upon completion of the download to guide the installation. If using Firefox, the .dmg file must be saved to disk first, then click on the downloaded file in Finder to launch the install. Mac OS X users may want to see how the installation will procede, described here, before beginning the download. Note: Mac OS X users must have X11 installed prior to using FreeSurfer (in Finder, look for Applications->Utilities->X11). X11 is installed via XQuartz (see Apple notes).

Important Note! When processing a group of subjects for your study, it is essential to process all your subjects with the same version of freesurfer, on the same OS platform and vendor, and for safety, even the same version of the OS. While we continue to work to ensure that results match across platforms (for instance the 32b and 64b CentOS 4 builds should produce identical results), there are none-the-less system-level libraries that are OS dependent. An exception to this rule is that you may view and edit files across any platform or version, and run some post-processing tools (outside the recon-all stream) if you check with us first (for instance you may run the longitudinal processing with newer versions).

FreeSurfer executables are available for the following platforms. Click on the filename to begin download, saving the file to your machine.

Stable 5.2 release

Please refer to the ReleaseNotes page for per-release information.

Notes:

• uncompressed (installed) size is 8.3GB.

• here is the md5sum data and sha1sum data for confirming tarball integrity after download.

• See these instruction for loading the Freesurfer Virtualbox disk image

• the root password for the Virtualbox release is freesurfer

• on Ubuntu, you might have to do this if qdec or freeview complain about libjpeg or libtiff:

cd /usr/lib (/usr/lib/i386 or /usr/lib/x86_64 on some Ubuntu distros)
sudo ln -s libjpeg.so.8 libjpeg.so.62
sudo ln -s libtiff.so.4 libtiff.so.3

wget

If you are having problems downloading the installation from your browser, you could use the command-line 'wget' utility ('curl -O' on the Mac):

wget -c ftp://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pub/dist/freesurfer/5.2.0/<filename>

where <filename> is a filename from the Download column in the table above. Note that the '-c' flag allows continuing a failed partial download.

Archive

Old releases are here.

Dev

Some nightly dev builds are here.

Notes

uname -m

If the output says 'x86_64', you have a 64-bit Intel-compatible machine.

Note that a license key file is necessary to run the FreeSurfer binaries (but is not necessary to download and install FreeSurfer).

Registration is here.

Upon completion of the download, proceed to the installation section.

iSurf App

A brain segmentation tutorial application for the iPhone/iPad created by an external developer, making use of Freesurfer's segmentation, is available here.