Installation

ePiX is distributed over the World-Wide Web as source code. Packages (stable and development) can be found at

  http://math.holycross.edu/~ahwang/current/ePiX.html

In a web browser, shift-click on a link to download. The latest stable release is also on the CTAN mirrors, in the graphics directory. There are instructions for downloading an entire directory; it is not recommended that you download the files individually. (Some users of Red Hat have reported file permission problems when unpacking the CTAN tarballs. If you encounter this difficulty, please try downloading the sources from the project main page.) Unpack the compressed tar file with the appropriate command:

  tar -zxvf epix-x.y.z_complete.tar.gz
  tar -jxvf epix-x.y.z_complete.tar.bz2

(x.y.z is the version number) or, if your tar doesn't do decompression,

  gunzip -c epix-x.y.z_complete.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
  bzcat epix-x.y.z_complete.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -

cd to the source directory, which is named epix-x.y.z. The INSTALL file contains detailed installation instructions. If you're impatient, the short of it is make [test]; make install. Respectively, these steps build the program, optionally run a test compile on the included sample files, and install the library, header file, and shell scripts.

There is an optional package, contributed by Svend Daugård Pedersen, that supplies extensions for enhanced Cartesian and logarithmic coordinate systems, and for hatching polygons and planar regions. To build this package, do make contrib before make install.

In order to use the contrib package, an input file must contain the line ``using namespace ePiX_contrib;'' For documentation, please see the directory $INSTALL/share/epix/tutorial/contrib.

By default, ePiX installs in subdirectories of /usr/local; if you want to install elsewhere, see the INSTALL file for detailed instructions. You may also want to consult POST-INSTALL for information on setting your PATH variable so your shell can find ePiX.

To re-iterate, ePiX is not a stand-alone program, but consists of a C/C++ library, header, and a shell script, and therefore requires a compiler for normal use. The GNU compiler (g++) and C++ library are strongly preferred, both because they are used to develop ePiX, and because they implement many mathematical features not specified by ANSI C. ePiX is also reliant on the GNU shell bash. Most Unices (and all major GNU/Linux distributions) have bash in /bin/bash. The INSTALL file explains how to cope with bash that is elsewhere. If you port ePiX to another shell or operating environment, or package ePiX for other systems, please notify the author so that your work can be linked from the project page and mentioned in the documentation.

Should it come to this, the command make uninstall will remove installed components of ePiX from your system. You must be in the source directory, and may need to log in as root.