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 Forth or 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. Linux 64 bit distributions need additional packages to run 32 bit applications. We have had success after installing the following manually: ia32-libs libc6-i386 gcc-multilib gawk for rebuilding the support library 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.