VFX Forth for Linux Installation Notes ====================================== 11 March 2016 Because of the hassle of packaging for Linux, VFX Forth for Linux is provided as a tarball. After extracting the tarball, you must copy the executables and shared libraries to the directories expected by your distribution. After installation, you will find the PDF manual as /Doc/VfxLin.pdf Installing from the tarball .tar.gz ----------------------------------- The tarball was created with tar -zcvf ... Extract the tarball to a suitable directory. tar -zxvf ... A directory will be created containing all the VFX Forth files, where xxx is one of Eval, Standard, Pro and Mission. Change to this directory. cd The directory incudes a shell script ./InstallMe.Lin32.sh that performs the installation on most 32 bit Linux distributions. You will have to edit this for 64 bit distributions. The instructions below for a tarball apply if you are installing manually. The executables and shared libraries are in the Bin subdirectory. You should now copy these to the "right" places for your distribution, usually /usr/bin and /usr/lib for 32 bit distributions. The files to copy to /usr/bin are Bin/vfxlin and/or Bin/vfxlin386. The files to copy to /usr/lib are Bin/libmpeparser.so.0 and Bin/vfxsupp.so.1.0.1. This last needs a symbolic link as vfxsupp.so.1. ln -s vfxsupp.so.1.0.1 vfxsupp.so.1 The shared library libmpeparser.so.0 contains the code to support persistent INI files and and vfxsupp.so.1.0.1 contains a large number of (case-sensitive) constants from Linux header files. Some modern 64 bit distributions do not include the 32 bit run-time libc library needed by VFX Forth for Linux. You may have to install this yourself. The package is usually called libc6-i386. PDFtex ------ If you are going to use the DocGen documentation generator to produce PDF files, you will need to install a copy of LaTex2e. You will also need the PDF version, usually called pdftex. You will probably have a version already installed. If not, consult the installation system for your Linux distribution. Directory structure ------------------- /usr/bin - binaries ~/VfxLinxx - or wherever you put it Bin - Executables and their related files Doc - Manuals and documentation AnsForth.Htm - ANS Forth HTML documentation VfxLin.htm - VFX Forth HTML documentation EXAMPLES - Examples to look at and use - has subdirectories Kernel - source code if applicable - has subdirectories, not present in all versions Lib - library of tools maintained by MPE FSL - A port of the Forth Scientific Library Genio - Examples of Generic I/O drivers Lin32 - Linux specific code OOP - Several OOP packages SharedLibs - interfaces to common libraries SOURCES - source code if applicable - has subdirectories, not present in all versions TOOLS - useful third party and O/S specific tools - not present in all versions VFXBase - source code if applicable - has subdirectories, not present in all versions XTRA - Additional third party O/S specific tools - not present in all versions Assumptions ----------- VFX Forth requires the following shared libraries in order to start: /lib/ld-linux.so.2 libc.so.6 Users report that installing a symbolic link has fixed startup problems. Configuration ------------- Now please read the PDF manual for details of how to configure VFX Forth to know about your favourite editor and so on.