Swarm on Win95. FAQ entries. Long-lacking guide for ground-level beginners.

[Paul E. Johnson]

I almost barfed when I finally installed cygnus b20 and swarm-1.4 on a
windows machine.  It is so darned easy I almost fainted.  I'm taking the
stuff out of the FAQ and replacing it with this.  This is intended for a
new user.  The people who were recently new users in this list might
give me feedback to say if this would have helped them.

Question: How do I install Swarm-1.4 in a Microsoft environment.

As indicated on the Swarm homepage, this is a 2 step process. 

1. Download the Cygnus Cygwin library. Learn about it at Cygwin's Web
site:
   http://www.cygnus.com 
They have links to information and ftp sites.  Go to a site (my
favorite: ftp://ftp.the-b.org/pub/cygwin/cygwin-b20) and get the package
"full.exe" for Cygwin Beta-20.  Make a directory in an out-of-the-way
place such as c:\tmp\cygnus and download it in there.

In explorer, go to c:\temp\cygnus and double-click on full.exe.   I let
it install itself into c:\cygnus and recommend "newbies" do the same,
since installation on other disk drives caused a big problem for users
of previous versions (although I can't say so about this one, because
I'm too smart to try it...).

2.  Download the Swarm stuff.  Make a directory c:\tmp\swarm and then go
to ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm and get these 2 files and save them
in c:\temp\swarm:

swarm-1_4.exe
swarmapps-1.4.tar.gz
(Windows muffs the second file name and saves it as
swarmapps-1_4_tar.gz. Don't worry about it).

In explorer, go to c:\tmp\swarm and doubleclick on swarm-1_4.exe. Say
OK, follow the boxes, if you accept the defaults the swarm library will
be installed in c:\Swarm-1.4.  When it asks if  you want to reboot, say
yes. After the reboot, look in your start menu, see the Swarm item and
its "bash" subitem, choose that and you see an "X terminal" in which you
can type unix commands and do unix stuff. I think we ought to call that
box a "Swarm-term". How about you?

POSSIBLE INSTALL PROBLEMS 
1. During Swarm install, you may get "Severe: could not find PATH in
autoexec.bat".  That crashes the installation.  If you see this, use
explorer to look in c:\ for the file autoexec.bat. Do you find it? Do
you have PATH in there? If not, create one with a text editor and add a
line like this:

     PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND

Then in explorer, go back to c:\temp\swarm and double click on
swarm-1_4.exe to try installing again. 

2. If you do not have a directory called c:\tmp, you will get an error
message about it when you first run the swarm-term.  So why not just
create one?

3. Installing on drive D? If it works drop me a line. It sure didn't
work nicely with Cygwin b-19.

Q. What do you do then?

Answer: I'll suppose you don't know much about Unix.  Create a directory
where you want to have your swarm code, let's call it c:\swarm. This is
NOT the same place where the Swarm library is installed. It is a
different place. So create such a place, like c:\swarm.

Then you want to unpack swarmapps-1_4_tar.gz into that directory.  The
shareware program for Windows called Winzip can extract this file for
you.  If you don't have Winzip, I'm not sure exactly what you'd do to
open a tarball in Windows.  In Winzip, this happens after you
double-click on swarmapps-1_4_tar.gz. It asks for the file name of the
thing inside. It prompts you with "swarmapps-1_4_tar." and you must
change that to something like "swarmapps-1_4.tar" and after that Winzip
will give you a list of all the files inside the tarball.  You should
see stuff like "heatbugs" and so forth.  Click the "extract" button but
when it asks for the target directory, choose your "special place"
c:\swarm.  That should create a directory c:\swarm\swarmapps-1.4 and
under that will be directories like tutorial, heatbugs, etc. 

Now fire up a "Swarm-term."  In here you use Unix style commands.  There
is a brief recitation of Unix terms in a separate FAQ for people that
use Swarm on Unix systems, but it might be useful for Windows users
too.  There is a link to it somewhere here in the SwarmOnlineFAQ.

For starters,type this:
   ls  (and hit return. I'm not typing "hit return" any more after
this!)
You should see a unix-style listing of files in the directory where your
swarm library is installed. Compare it against c:\Swarm-1.4.

Now, type this:
   cd /swarm  
and
    ls
You should see a directory listing of your swarm programs, which now
contains just swarmapps-1.4.  Now type
    cd swarmapps-1.4.
(Big hint. The "TAB" key will complete long words for you in a
Swarm-term, so just type s and hit TAB). Type ls again to survey the
offerings.  Then type
    cd heatbugs
You can look at the contents of these files with any Windows editor you
want. Just use explorer to go to c:\swarm\swarmapps-1.4\heatbugs.  Or
you can use a Unix editor in the Swarm-term, if you install a Unix
editor.  To simply view the files, the Unix command "less filename" will
work in the Swarm-term as provided.

Now you are in the heatbugs directory, type
    make
This is the Unix command that is used to compile software, to turn code
into an executable. After it finishes, you should see a new file after
you type "ls". That file is an executable called "heatbugs". In Unix,
you usually type
   ./heatbugs
to make the program run. That will work here, but my trial experience
indicates that the "./" is not necessary in the newest version of
Swarm-term.  That should run the program and you are off to the races.

Question: How am I supposed to edit these files?

Answer: My favorite Windows editor is a free program called PFE, short
for "Programmers File Editor."  You don't need to mess around in the
Swarm-term except when you want to compile code.

Certain people who like to use the editor called Emacs. This is a
powerhouse Unix program that has been ported to Windows. One virtue of
Emacs is that it is integrated with shell programs like bash (the
Swarm-term, in other words) and you can compile and execute code from
within Emacs. Emacs has color-coding for keywords. If you look back in
the mailing list, you will see various tips about it. I've not tried it
yet, so I can't say.



-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (913) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (913) 864-5700

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