Installing SBW

This page will detail how to install SBW on the major supported operating systems:

Win32 (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Vista)
Mac OS X (10.3, 10.4)
Linux (Suse, Fedora ...)

Windows

On Windows systems we use the nullsoft scriptable install system (NSIS).Thus the installer is a simple executable file to be started by double clicking on it. When the installer is started several tests will be performed on the system such as:

has the user administrative rights
is the .net Framework installed
is python installed (if so is numerical python (numpy) present?)

based on these informations the installable modules are selected. And the installation will proceed:

Welcome Screen

Selecting the installation directory

Choosing a Program Group

The installation proceeds...

Components are registered

NOTE: During the registration process firewall warnings might pop up, informing you that the Broker or one of the SBW modules tries to open a network connection. What is actually happening is that these modules communicate among each other. For that to work it is necessary that the Broker can occupy two ports on the local machine.

The installation is done

OS X

For OS X we provide a similar installer as for Linux. That is we used the Bitrock InstallBuilder. On OS X this installer takes the form of an Application Bundle. When you download the file using Safari the archive will be extracted automatically and all that is to be done is to start the installer. The installation procedure looks like this:

Welcome Screen

Choosing the installationdirectory

Setting Environment Variables

Ready to Install

Copying Files

Registering Components

Display Registration results

Installation complete

Linux

Linux is difficult to support as there are many, many variants of it. We still wanted to provide a simple installation, that does not involve compiling the whole project along with all it's modules. For this reason we used the Bitrock InstallBuilder. The installer comes along in a .bin file. To start the installation procedure you will have to set the executable flag on the installer after downloading. e.g: chmod +x ./SBW-2.5.0-linux-installer.bin

As it turns out, on a small number this installer seems not to run with the default settings. But not to worry ... that's why we have command line switches:

By default the installer will use GTK2
Running the installer with command line switch: --mode xwindows will start the installer in XWindow mode.
Running the installer with command line switch: --mode text will start the installer in text mode.
Running the installer with command line switch: --mode unattended will start the installer in silent mode ... assuming all the default options.

Welcome Screen