For Redhat Linux users on the i386 platform, just grab the latest
moodss, tcl, tk, tktable and blt rpms on my sites at
http://www.multimania.com/jfontain/ or http://jfontain.free.fr/.

Note: precompiled latest versions of the BLT and tkTable libraries are
also available.


For the others:

Moodss requires Tcl 8.2 and Tk 8.2 or above to be installed and
working on your UNIX or Windows platform.

Then the tkTable widget library version 2.5 for UNIX (at
http://www.purl.org/net/hobbs/tcl/) needs to be installed as a package
(in the Tcl sense) on your system.

Note: a precompiled Linux library for the latest version is available
on my site.

Note: the following line is all you need in the pkgIndex.tcl file
(along with the Tktable.so.2.5 library file in the
/usr/local/lib/Tktable/ directory on UNIX) for a working tkTable
package:

package ifneeded Tktable 2.5 "load [file join $dir Tktable.so.2.5]"

For Windows, get the tkTable DLL for Tcl 8.2 (if it exists, I have not
checked) from the tktable site above.


Then the following BLT library:
ftp://ftp.tcltk.com/pub/blt/BLT2.4i.tar.gz needs to be installed also
as a package (always grab the latest version, 2.4i at this
time): follow the instructions in the BLT package.

Note: a precompiled Linux library for the latest version is available
on my site.

For Windows, get BLT for windows (check that there is a version for
Tcl/Tk 8.2), which contains BLT24.DLL at ftp://ftp.tcltk.com/pub/blt/.



For a quick try without installing tkTable and BLT as packages as
described above, just copy Tktable.so.2.5 and libBLT.so.2.4i (or the
corresponding DLLs on Windows) to the moodss unpacking directory and
from that directory launch "wish moodss random", for example.
Note: if you so proceed, the configuration/preference dialog boxes
will not work as they require a complete installation of the BLT
package.




Then there are 2 cases:


1. you only want to use moodss as is and eventually write modules for
it:

There is nothing else to do since the moodss file is a self contained
Tcl application. Thus, typing the following from the unpacking
directory should work:

$ wish moodss random

If you would like to run moodss from any directory, then you need to
install the data modules that you are interested in as Tcl packages,
which is really not difficult: it is just the matter of moving the
package sub-directories to directories that the Tcl core will look
into (/usr/local/lib/ by default on Unix, /opt/tcltk/lib/ on Linux if
you used the rpms) (look at the pkg_mkIndex manual page for more
information).

For example, to install the random module as a Tcl package on UNIX,
you could do:
$ mkdir /usr/local/lib/random
$ cp /home/jdoe/moodss-5.x/random/* /usr/local/lib/random/


2. you would also like to work on the moodss core (not the modules)
source code itself:

You will need to install stooop (4.0.1 or above, switched package
version 2.2 included), scwoop (3.0 or above) and tkpiechart (6.0 or
above) as Tcl packages. All the information required to do this can be
found in the packages themselves, at
http://www.multimania.com/jfontain/ or
http://jfontain.free.fr/ or
ftp://ftp.neosoft.com/pub/tcl/sorted/devel/.
Please contact me if you add functionality, fix bugs, ... so I can
integrate your modifications to the core. Thank you very much in
advance.


A final note for windows users:
I have stopped testing moodss on windows, although I do not see why it
would not work if the tktable and blt packages are installed properly.
I have to deal with windows nt and 9x platforms as part of my regular
job and have come to hate microsoft after waisting so much time
rebooting, installing, deinstalling, managing anti-virus software,
trying to calm angry users in front of a hung PC with no valid
explanation to give them, having to deal with microsoft bigots with no
technical knowledge of protocols, software design, ..., managers
making single-handed purchasing decisions while still thinking that a
user-space application crashing a whole system is normal.
There is light at the end of the tunnel though, as people start
noticing that our web / mail / news / print / file / backup Linux
server never fails. Some of them even boot Linux instead of windows
from time to time...
Anyway, if you successfully installed and used moodss on a windows
platform, please share you experience with me: I will be happy to
improve this document.



Feel free to email questions and comments to
mailto:jfontain@multimania.com if you have any problems.
