Windows

From Madagascar
Revision as of 16:15, 29 October 2008 by Sfomel (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Madagascar has been run on Microsoft Windows machines, but there are several dependencies.

Madagascar runs under Cygwin, which provides a Unix-like environment under Windows.

To obtain Cygwin, go to its web page, download and run the installer. This should create a Cygwin program, which when run, creates a POSIX shell window similar-looking to the Windows command window but which behaves in a more Unix-like way.

NOTE: If you are unfamiliar with Unix-like systems, a good place to start is Greg Wilson's Software Carpentry course.

Cygwin-icon.gif

You will need to install several additional Cygwin components before Madagascar can run. To get these, rerun the installer program (called Setup and represented by an icon with a black "C" shape enclosing a green arrow).

  1. Start Setup program.
  2. Keep clicking (defaults should work, but please choose a mirror on your own continent) until you see a collapsed list (boxed "+" signs) in a selection box.
  3. Choose all of the following before downloading.
    1. Open the Devel section and select the following:
      • gcc
      If you want to use the development version of Madagascar, also choose
      • subversion
    2. If you have a favorite unix editor, also choose it under Editors (novices may wish to work with Notepad for a while). Both vim and emacs are available.
    3. Open Interpreters and select
      • python
    4. Open Libs and select
      • sunrpc
    5. Open X11 and select
      • xorg-x11-devel
  4. Next, click Next>
    Your download will proceed.
  5. When done, click Finish.

You will need to ensure that X applications can be started from the cygwin command line. Type xterm and ensure that an X terminal appears.

If you use xming, it is necessary to ensure that the environment variable DISPLAY is set to :0 before trying to run xterm.

Once you have verified that you can display xwindows from cygwin, you should be ready to do a normal Madagascar Installation

To set environment variables

on a per-session basis, type:

export <variablename>=<variablevalue>, for example

export DISPLAY=:0

sets the value of DISPLAY to ":0" which is appropriate for xming.

To make this selection "sticky" (permanent until you change the file) change to your cygwin home by typing

cd

and edit the file ".bash_profile" putting the desired environment variables in there.

NOTE: Windows and subversion cannot handle the same paths. Be sure you install madagascar into a path where there is no whitespace in the directory names.