Table of Contents
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 either GZIP or BZIP2,
both of which are standard compression formats. The
gzip(1) utility is freely available from the GNU
Project, and the bzip2(1) utility can be downloaded
for free from RedHat,
Inc.. The GNU version of TAR has the GZIP and BZIP2 algorithms
built in. The compression algorithm used can be determined by the file
extension. Files compressed with GZIP end in .gz;
files compressed with BZIP2 end in .bz2.
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 -
For versions of TAR without built-in BZIP2 support (there is no
-j option) the command is similar:
% bzip2 -cd vrjuggler-distribution.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -
Here, you should fill in
vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gz (or
vrjuggler-distribution.tar.bz2) with the name of
the VR Juggler distribution file you downloaded. The above commands 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 (for GZIP):
% gunzip vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gz % tar -xvf vrjuggler-distribution.tar
or for BZIP2:
% bunzip2 vrjuggler-distribution.tar.bz2 % 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
(-j for BZIP2), but you can simplify your work if that
option is supported. The following illustrates how to decompress and
extract a TAR file compressed with GZIP all in one step:
% tar -xzvf vrjuggler-distribution.tar.gz
The following would be used for a TAR file compressed with BZIP2:
% tar -xjvf vrjuggler-distribution.tar.bz2
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.