Installing


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Since MeCat is written in the interpreter language Java it can run wherever there is a Java Virtual Machine supporting the version 5.0. At the moment I only know of one Virtual Machine able to do so, that is the one from sun. Since for most operating systems it is best to use the operating system dependent installer, I built some installing scripts for the most common operating systems.

For the following OSs I did a script:

And for Ubuntu there are only some remarks that could help you install. If your operating system is none of the above, then you might want to use MeCat manually.

Manual use of MeCat

In order to run MeCat manually, you need 4 things.
  1. Java 5.0: Java 5.0 can be downloaded from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp. At the sun site, you can decide whether you want the JDK 5.0 or the JRE 5.0. For running MeCat, you only need the smaller JRE 5.0.
  2. MeCat: Download the file mecat-1.4.5.jar.
  3. Xerces: Xerces can be found at xerces.apache.org. After downloading it, you will have to extract it in order to use the XercesImpl.jar.
  4. LaTeX: LaTeX is needed for printing. The installation of LaTeX is different on each system. Wikipedia is a good start if you want to know more about LaTeX and your operating system.
Running MeCat then looks something like this:
/opt/sun-jdk-1.5.0.11/bin/java -cp /usr/share/xerces-2/lib/xercesImpl.jar:dist/mecat-1.4.5.jar net/sourceforge/mecat/catalog/gui/splasher/Splasher
If the two files xercesImpl.jar and mecat-1.4.5.jar are in the same directory, the following command should suffice:
java -jar mecat-1.4.5.jar

Manual use of modules

In order to use a module manually, the zip-file of the module has to be downloaded and unpacked. The zip-file contains a jar-file (the module itself), a "mecat.module" file (text-format configuration file) and manuals (ReadMe.txt).

The file with the ending "mecat.module" needs to be in one of two places, either in /usr/share/mecat/modules or in the same directory as the mecat-*.jar file. This way, MeCat will find the module next time it starts.

The file with the ending "mecat.module" needs to be adapted by hand. The links in the file need to be consistent with files in the file system. For further information about those files one should read the ReadMe.txt.