Installing Tix 4.1

Introduction

This version of Tix supports both Unix platforms and Windows platforms.

Unix Installation

Requirements

This version of Tix can be compiled to run under several configurations on Unix platforms.

Installing tixwish

This release of Tix supports the GNU autoconf utility. It should compile and run with little or no effort on any UNIX-like system that approximates POSIX, BSD, or System V and runs the X Window System. I know that it runs on Sun (Solaris and SunOS) and SGI workstations and also works on Linux boxes.

Please follow steps when compiling and installing Tix:

  1. Make sure that this directory and the corresponding release of Tcl and Tk are both subdirectories of the same directory. In short, if you store the source distributions in the directory /home/blah/src/, then it should directory structure should look like this,:
           /home/blah/src/tcl7.4/
           /home/blah/src/tk4.0/
           /home/blah/src/Tix4.1a2/
           
    If you want to compile Tix with Tcl7.5/Tk 4.0, you should have these additional directories in your source tree:
           /home/blah/src/tcl7.5/
           /home/blah/src/tk4.1/
           
    If you want to compile Tix with ITcl 2.0, you should have the following directory in your source tree:
           /home/blah/src/itcl2.0/
           
  2. Run the Tix setup program to configure the Tix library. This program will allow you to choose various options such as which version(s) of Tcl/Tk you want to compile with, the location of the Tcl/Tk libraries, etc. To run the setup program, type "./setup" in the toplevel directory. This program is a GUI front-end for the GNU "configure" script. The set of available options are described in the the program.

    Before running setup, make sure that you have the program wish4.0 installed on your system (usually in /usr/local/bin/wish4.0). If not, you can start the setup program by typing

           wish setup
           

    Alternatively, you can use the GNU configure script to configure the Tix package. The set of available options can be found by doing the following:

           cd Tix4.1a2/
           ./configure --help
           
  3. After running setup or configure, you should get a set of Makefile's. Now type "make" in the toplevel directory of Tix. This will create several executables, library archives and/or dynamic libraries for you, depending on the options you have chosen in while running setup:

  4. If make fails then you'll have to personalize the Makefile's for your site or possibly modify the distribution in other ways. First check the files docs/FAQ.html and docs/Porting.html to see if there are hints for compiling on your system. If you need to modify Makefile's, there are comments at the beginning of it that describe the things you might want to change and how to change them.

  5. If you are paranoid, these is a small set of test scripts that tests the behavior of Tix under various configurations. You can type "make test" to run these tests. Hopefully it will report "0 error(s) found".

  6. Type "make install" to install Tix's binaries and script files in standard places. In the default configuration information will be installed in /usr/local so you'll need write permission on this directory. If you'd like to use a default installation directory, you can change the "exec_prefix" and "prefix" definitions in the Makefile's.

  7. At this point you can play with Tcl by invoking the "tixwish" program and typing Tcl commands. However, if you haven't installed Tix then you'll first need to set your TIX_LIBRARY environment variable to hold the full path name of the "Tix4.1a2/library" subdirectory. You could try doing the following in the Unix C Shell or Bourne Shell
    env TIX_LIBRARY=/PATH/TO/TIX/SOURCES/library ./tixwish
    If you haven't installed Tcl and/or Tk then you'll need to set your TCL_LIBRARY and TK_LIBRARY environment variable as well (see the Tcl and Tk README files for information on this).

If you have trouble compiling Tix, I'd suggest looking at the files docs/FAQ.html and docs/Porting.html. It contains information that people have sent me about changes they had to make to compile Tix in various environments.

I make no guarantees that this information is accurate, complete, or up-to-date, but you may find it useful. If you get Tix running on a new configuration and had to make non-trivial changes to do it, I'd be happy to receive new information to add to docs/Porting.html. I'm also interested in hearing how to change the configuration setup so that Tix compiles on additional platforms "out of the box". If you have compiled and/or installed multiple versions of Tk and Tix on your machine, make sure you are compile tix with the correct version of the Tk header files. If you get a core dump as soon as you start tixwish, please refer to the FAQ .


Windows Installation

Requirements

This version of Tix runs under various 32 bit MS Windows environment (Win32s, Win95 and WinNT). The final release of Tcl 7.5/Tk4.1 for Windows is required. It won't work with the alpha or beta versions of Tcl 7.5/Tk4.1.

Binary Installation

Pre-compiled Windows binaries of Tix can be obtained via FTP at ftp://ftp.xpi.com/pub/windows/tix41bin.zip. All the filenames in this ZIP file can be fit in 8.3 format. You can unzip this file into a directory such as C:\Tix41. Then, set the environment variable TIX_LIBRARY to the Library subdirectory of the Tix installation. Then, you can load the Tix DLL into the Wish41.Exe program and start using the Tix commands. The following is an example of the sequence of commands you can type inside the Wish41.exe console to load and run the Tix demo program.
  set env(TIX_LIBRARY) C:\\Tix41\\Library
  load C:\\Tix41\\Bin\\Tix41.DLL Tix
  source C:\\Tix41\\Demos\widget
 

Compiling Tix on Windows

If you wish to compile Tix on Windows, you must get the Tix source distribution at ftp://ftp.xpi.com/pub/windows/tix41a2.zip . This ZIP file contains files with long file names and must be unzipped by an UNZIP program that knows long filenames, such as WinZip.Exe.

You also need to download the latest version of the Tcl7.5/Tk4.1 source releases and compile them before compiling Tix. Hopefully that will give you a good exercise on setting up the environment for compiling Tcl-based programs on the Windows platforms.

Then you can change to the Tix4.1a2\Win subdirectory. If you have Borland C++ 4.5 or 5.0, you can edit the first few lines of the file Makefile.bc according to your environment. Then, you can type

  make -f makefile.bc 
in the DOS window. When it finishes, you'll get the files Tix41.DLL and Txwish41.Exe. Tix41.DLL is probably easier to work with because all the path settings can be done inside a Tcl script. To run Txwish41.Exe, you must set the TIX_LIBRARY environment variable probably, possibly inside your AUTOEXEC.BAT file.

If you have Visual C++ installed, you can edit the file Makefile.vc and then type

 nmake -f Makefile.vc 
in the DOS Windows. Notice that if you use Visual C++, you must compile Tcl and Tk with Visual C++ as well and link the VC++ compiled .LIB files with Tix.

FAQ's for Unix Programmers Migrating to DOS/Windows

I get an "out of environment space" error from DOS.

Edit your config.sys file and add the switch "/E:1024" to the SHELL=COMMAND.COM line. This should give you enough env space.

My C compiler says "unrecognized file format Tk41.LIB" or something like that.

You compiled Tk41.LIB with VC++ and are compiling Tix with Borland C++, or vice verse. Use the same compiler to compile all binaries instead.

What is the "My computer" directory in the file selection boxes?

That's just C:\, but that may change in the future.

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Last modified Apr 23 22:34