Windows Native System Requirements, Conventions, and Installation

System requirements

This toolkit is known to run on Windows XP Professional. We have no access to Windows Vista, and don't expect to. We've begun testing on Windows 7 64-bit, and we believe we've fixed a mysterious bug which was causing it not to work, so if you want to try it, have at it.

This toolkit depends on a number of external tools which must be installed before you install MAT. For the Windows version, they are:

Conventions

MAT is primarily a Unix-based tool, so the documentation is written mostly with reference to Unix. As a result, you should first familiarize yourself with the Unix conventions, and make sure you know the DOS CMD equivalents of basic Unix operations like pwd, cd, etc. We'll assume throughout that you've set your MAT_PKG_HOME cmd shell variable to the directory src/MAT inside the unpacked zip file.

The documentation assumes you've added Python to your Windows path.

MAT may be installed in directories whose paths contain spaces. If you do this, you'll likely have to wrap double-quotes around any references to MAT_PKG_HOME or subdirectories thereof:

> cd "%MAT_PKG_HOME%"
> dir "%CD%"

If you don't do this, you'll likely encounter bizarre behavior due to the path being expanded and split into command-line tokens according to the whitespace in the path.

Installation

First, ensure that you have Java installed. You'll need version 1.6.0_04 or later. The installer looks for any version of Java found in C:\Program Files\Java. The installer will probe all the Java versions and choose the newest one that meets the system requirements. If you don't have Java, you can get it from Sun.

Next, install Python. You can get version 2.5.4 here. You don't need any of Mark Hammond's Python win32 extensions. You'll probably want to add Python to your Windows path; we'll assume throughout that you've done so.

Next, open a Windows cmd shell, e.g., via Start -> Run -> cmd. We recommend that you ensure that the output history is longer than the default 50 lines; click left on the leftmost icon in the top window bar in the "cmd" window, select Properties, select the Layout tab, and change "Height" under "Screen Buffer Size" to, say, 500.

Next, open the unzipped directory containing this distribution in your file viewer (e.g., navigating from "My Computer"). In the top directory of the distribution, you should see a file "install.py". In your cmd shell window, type "python", and then a space, and then drag this file to the cmd shell window. Switch to the cmd shell and press <return>. This will run the MAT installer.

The output of the installer is fairly verbose. If it does not print out "Done" at the end, it hasn't completed appropriately.