(by Michael Froehlich, July 15, 1996)

Platform Requirements and Installation
======================================

Platform Requirements
---------------------

daVinci V2.0.1 is available for UNIX platforms which are supported by X-Window
(X11) and the Tcl/Tk toolkit. At the moment there are binary distributions
for the following operating systems:

   * Sun Solaris 2.x for SPARC
   * SunOS 4.1.x
   * HP-UX
   * IBM AIX
   * SGI IRIX
   * DEC UNIX (aka OSF/1)
   * DEC Ultrix
   * Linux

If you miss a UNIX platform where daVinci is not available for at the
moment, then feel free to contact the developers for asking about a port.
The source code of daVinci is not available.

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 an X-Window environment. 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


Installation
------------

Overview:

  1. Get daVinci by ftp
  2. Use gunzip, tar -xf
  3. Set $DAVINCIHOME to the daVinci directory
  4. Be sure to have Netscape 2.0 or higher for the online documentation
  5. Start daVinci
  6. Read and accept the license

Detail:

After downloading the daVinci distribution for the particular UNIX platform
by ftp, the retrieved file need to be uncompressed with command "gunzip 
<file>" and afterwards extracted by using command "tar -xf <file>". This 
will create a directory daVinci_V2.0 in your current directory. To place 
daVinci at another location, you have to move the daVinci_V2.0 directory 
completly to some other directory of your filesystem.

Before starting daVinci, you have to set environment variable $DAVINCIHOME
to the absolute file name of the daVinci_V2.0 directory on your computer.
daVinci needs to know this location to find resources, e.g. the online
documentation or the graph editor. For example, if you have installed
daVinci in your home directory /home/me, then in a csh the environment
variable can be set using the following command:

     setenv DAVINCIHOME /home/me/daVinci_V2.0

You should make this setting permanent by putting the command into the
.cshrc file which is usually in your home directory. The setting policy may
be different if you are using another UNIX shell than csh. Finally, make
sure that you have installed Netscape 1.1 or higher to work with the online
documentation. For the search engine, written in Java, you need to have
at least version 2.0 of the Netscape browser.

After moving to the daVinci_V2.0 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_V2.0 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.

-End-
