Required Computer/Processor (one of...):

PC : AMD K6/K7/K8 or Intel P2/P3/P4 (absolute minimum is 386)

Macintosh : G3/G4/G5

Corel NetWinder : StrongARM V4L

HP iPaq : some processor that works like the NetWinder

could work on SiliconGraphics and SPARCstation with a little nurture.

Required OS (one of...):

Linux (most any variant) (recommended)

MacOS 10.2 or later (experimental)

Windows with MinGW (very experimental)

Required Software:

Ruby 1.6.6 or more recent (1.8.0 recommended) (make sure you have the *.so and *.h files) (on MacOS you may have to remove or hide the existing one and install a more complete package)

Dataflow Software :

PureData 0.36 or later (recommended)

Multimedia Components (optional):

libSDL (Simple Directmedia Layer)

libjpeg

libpng

libmpeg3 (.mpg reader, HeroineWarrior's)

libquicktime (.mov reader/writer, Burkhard Plaum's or HeroineWarrior's)

libmpeg (.mpg reader, Greg Ward's, old)

Apple QuickTime (.mov reader/writer)

Ascii Art Library (aalib)

PCI video digitizer card (and Video4linux 1 driver)

USB camera (and Video4linux 1 driver)

Developer Tools (roll-your-own):

GNU C++ Compiler (gcc/g++) version 3.x or maybe 2.95

GNU Make (gmake)

CVS (for upgrading/collaboration)

Ruby library "xmlparser" (optional, for editing documentation)

Developer Tools CD dec 2002 (if MacOS 10.2)

XCODE (if MacOS 10.3)

FINK (if MacOS 10)

NOTE: Apparently GCC 2.x has problems dealing with *.a components; if that affects you, use *.so files instead.

The CVS has the absolute latest version of GridFlow, but it's not guaranteed to be working, whereas the actual releases are more tested.

However you may have various reasons to use the CVS edition, so here's how:

Make sure you have the cvs program installed.

mkdir -p ~/src/gridflow (make a directory; it could be called otherwise if you like)

cd ~/src/gridflow (go in that directory)

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.gridflow.ca:/home/cvs/gridflow login (the password is blank)

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.gridflow.ca:/home/cvs/gridflow checkout . (download the first time)

And the subsequent times, you only do this:

cd ~/src/gridflow

cvs update -dP

Install Ruby. Make sure it contains ruby.h and intern.h and related files. It's also recommended to have libruby.so. Those extra files may be in a package called ruby-dev if you are using RPM or DEB/FINK. If you are building Ruby yourself, it's better to configure ruby with --enable-shared. If you install into a system directory, you may have to run ldconfig after installing Ruby.

Download GridFlow from the website and uncompress it, or get it from the CVS server.

Run ./configure from the gridflow directory. Make sure it detects all the components you want to use with GridFlow. In MacOS you would normally use FINK to install: libjpeg libjpeg-shlibs libpng-shlibs libpng3 libpng3-shlibs libmpeg libmpeg-shlibs

Note: you may have to set CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH to indicate where to find *.h files, and you may have to set both LIBRARY_PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to indicate where to find *.so or *.aor *.dylib or *.bundle or *.dll or *.lib files.

Note: you can do ./configure --help to get a list of supported options. You can use them to ignore the presence of troublesome libraries and select debugging level. With --use-compiler you should use a version of g++, not directly a version of gcc, else you get undefined symbol problems. Some versions of gcc/g++ are troublesome.

Run make to produce the executables gridflow.so and gridflow.pd_linux or similar

Run make install to copy those executables and related files to their final locations.

Run make test just to verify that GridFlow isn't working too bad.

With a text editor, create ~/.gridflow_startup and write something like GridFlow.data_path << "/home/myself/gridflow/images" to tell GridFlow where to find the images used in the examples. You may add more lines like that one if you have folders containing images or movies you want to use with GridFlow.

Loading GridFlow:

PureData : With a text editor, modify or create ~/.pdrc and write -lib gridflow.

ImpureData : In the ".pdrc editor", add gridflow to the list of libraries.

plain Ruby : the command require "gridflow" will load gridflow.so.

Note that on MacOS the dot-files are invisible in the Finder but you do cd ~/Desktop; ln -s ../.pdrc "PureData Configuration" to make an alias on the Desktop. Note also that on Windows the dot-files are even more trouble.

you just did a CVS update and now the program does not compile, or crashes, or changes didn't go through.

Did you forget the "make install" step?

If a new directory is created, you need to do cvs update -d. Many people just add that option to their configuration of the CVS software.

When some kinds of changes have happened, you may have to rerun the configure program before redoing make. If you had previously reconfigured with specific options, don't forget to use them again in this case.

Maybe matju forgot to upload part of an important change. Tell him.

PureData Crashing:

you can start the debugger like gdb `which pd` core.24255 where the latter part is the name of a RAM dump file. You can enable those dumps using the shell command ulimit -c unlimited. To avoid dumping, you can also start Pd from within the debugger using gdb `which pd` then run then cause the crash.

In GDB, after a crash, you can use the where to find out what Pd was doing at the moment of the crash. If instead Pd is frozen, you can force it to crash using Ctrl+C in the terminal.

To quit GDB use the quit command. (really.)