As with most Open Source projects, VR Juggler is distributed as compressed archive files using popular formats. Installing a distribution requires very little effort, but you do need to know how to use archiving utilities to extract the installation tree. Automation of the installation is a goal of the VR Juggler team, but we are still finalizing the details of cross-platform installation management. Before reading further, you should know where you want to install VR Juggler, and you should make sure that you have access to write to that directory.
The TAR (Tape ARchive) format has been around for a long, long time in the UNIX world. It is simply a collection of files in a directory tree that are lumped into a single file suitable for writing to a tape or for downloading. The format is a standard, and the tar(1) utility is available on every UNIX-based platform and on Win32. A free version can be downloaded from the GNU Project. A compressed TAR file is made for each VR Juggler distribution, and some distributions come in other formats as well. You can always count on the availability of a TAR file, though. The TAR files are compressed using GZIP which is a standard compression format. The gzip(1) utility is freely available from the GNU Project (the GNU version of TAR has the GZIP algorithm built in) if your platform does not have it.
Once you have downloaded a VR Juggler TAR distribution, you can unpack it one of two ways depending on what your platform's version of TAR supports. Before extracting the installation tree, make sure that your current directory is the one where you want to install VR Juggler. If your version of TAR does not have GZIP built in (it does not support the -z option), the following command will do the decompression and extraction:
% gzip -cd vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gz | tar -xvf -vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gz
Here, you should fill in vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gz with the name of the VR Juggler distribution file you downloaded. The above command will work with any shell that supports redirection of standard output to a pipe. If that looks too scary, you can separate the decompression and extraction into two commands:
% gunzip vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gz % tar -xvf vrjuggler-distribution.tar
Note that the distribution file in the second command does not have the .gz extension after gzip(1) is run. These steps also work if your version of tar(1) supports the -z option, but you can simplify your work if that option is supported. The following illustrates how to uncompress and extract all in one step:
% tar -xzvf vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gzztar
In either case, while the command runs, you will see the name of each file as it is written to disk. This is because of the -v option to tar(1) that tells it to be verbose in its efforts. tar(1) takes care of creating all the directories in the installation tree, so you only need to have the base directory (for example, /usr/local) when you start. For more information about these utilities, please refer to the tar(1) and gzip(1) manual pages.