Installing ARCS

Please notice that this procedure is only for the first version of ARCS.

The installation of ARCS has to follow several steps :

• Install Qt, version 3.3.8 (required dependency) ;
• Download ARCS ;
• Build ARCS from the sources.

This should be quite simple. The usual procedure is the following one :

tar xvf ARCS-1.0.tar.gz 
cd ARCS-1.0
qmake
make
su
make install

This could be translated as :

1. Unpack the archive ;
2. Go into the unpacked directory ;
3. Run the qmake utility from Qt framework in order to generate a Makefile ;
4. Build sources ;
5. Go into superuser mode ;
6. Install programs and libraries that have been built.

Building ARCS under Windows can get quite tricky. The first problem is to have a version of Qt running on Windows. If you have a commercial version of Qt 3.3.8, then you probably will not have a lot of problems compiling ARCS. For the other people who intend to make GPL software, you might have a look at the files from the qtwin initiative (be aware that qtwin (or Q…) is not something affiliated to the original qt project).

1. Go onto the Q... file page and download the archive that suits you the best ;
2. Unpack the library. We will suppose in the following explanations that it has been unpacked at the root of C: logical volume. Some of the instructions might be outdated since they are for Windows XP.

You must set several environment variables in order to compile Q… Under Windows XP, you will have to right click on My computer, choose the entry Property, the Advanced tab, and then the button Environment variables. You should add two different variables :

• QMAKESPEC with the value win32-msvc.net if you are using Visual Studio .net or Visual Studio Express ;
• QTDIR with the value c:\qt3 or another value if you have unpacked the archive elsewhere.

You should also add to the PATH environment variable the value c:\qt3\bin.

• First, you should a command prompt and move to the directory where the archive is unpacked ;
• Then, you should run the configuration script for environment variables used by Visual Studio which is in its binaries directory under the name vcvars32.bat ;
• Finally, you should launch the compilation by typing configure.bat.

After about an hour, Q… is compiled.

You will have to do the following steps :

• Unpack the archive ;
• Open a command line inside the directory obtained after unpacking the archive ;
• In the following order, for each one of the subdirectories libarcs, runtime, editor and sample, you should make the following actions :
  • Enter into the directory ;
  • Launch qmake ;
  • Open the file with the extension .vcproj using Visual and select the release configuration ;
  • Build the project under Visual ;
  • Enter into the next directory.
• At the end of the process you should have all that is required to have a minimalist ARCS framework working under Microsoft Windows.