Platform Requirements and Installation

The minimal hardware requirement for working seriously with daVinci is a UNIX workstation with a performance comparable to a Sun SPARCstation 10 or better (i.e. at least 1 SPECint95) and 32MB RAM. For PC's, an Intel 486 and 16MB or better is recommened. It is possible that daVinci will work on slower configurations or with fewer memory, but in this case the performance may be disappointing. If you have problems with not enough memory (daVinci will crash with a X Error: BadAlloc message as soon as no more memory is available), you should try to switch off the pixmap cache by starting daVinci with option -nocache.

The software requirement for daVinci is X11 Release 5 (X11R5) or higher. The user interface is implemented in Tcl/Tk, but it is not required to install Tcl/Tk in order to use daVinci. The system has been tested with the following X11 window managers:

• dtwm (CDE)
• mwm (Motif)
• olwm/olvwm (OpenWindows)
• fvwm/fvwm2
• ctwm
• twm

After downloading the daVinci distribution for the particular UNIX platform by ftp, the retrieved file need to be uncompressed with command gunzip <file.tar.gz> and afterwards extracted by using command tar -xvf <file.tar>. This will create a directory daVinci_V2.1 in your current directory. To place daVinci at another location, you need to move the daVinci_V2.1 directory completly to some other directory of your filesystem.

Before starting daVinci, you have to set the environment variable $DAVINCIHOME to the absolute file name of the daVinci_V2.1 directory on your computer. daVinci needs to know this location to find resources, e.g. the online documentation or the graph editor. Be careful with changing the location of the daVinci distribution after users of daVinci have saved their options, read the note in chapter Reference -> Command-Line Options -> $DAVINCIHOME for details. For example, if you have installed daVinci in your home directory /home/me, then the environment variable can be set using the following command:

For csh users:

%setenv DAVINCIHOME /home/me/daVinci_V2.1

For sh users:

%DAVINCIHOME=/home/me/daVinci_V2.1; export DAVINCIHOME

After moving to the daVinci_V2.1 directory with cd, you can start the system by entering command daVinci in the shell. For the first time a user is starting daVinci, a window with the license agreement will appear. Please read the terms of the agreement carefully. You can get the full text of the license by pressing the Show License button. The license text is also available in file LICENSE in the daVinci_V2.1 directory. By confirming the license window, you accept and agree to become bound by the terms of this license. Please press the Quit button in the license agreement window, if you do not agree to this license.

By confirming the license agreement, a notification window will appear to ask the user about sending an e-mail to the daVinci project. This notification is optional. Afterwards, daVinci can be used and Netscape will be started "automagically" to show the introduction page of the online documentation.