Unix System Requirements, Conventions, and Installation

• System requirements
• Conventions
• Installation
  

System requirements

This toolkit is designed to run on generic Unix. However, due to the difficulties in supporting the possible range of configurations, we are testing it, and providing detailed installation instructions, only for Linux Ubuntu 9.10.

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

• Python, version 2.4, 2.5, or 2.6. Most of our development is on 2.5. We believe 2.4 still works, but we don't test it very often. 2.6 is also lightly tested, but is known to work. 3.x is known not to work.
• Java, version 1.6.0_04 or later.
  
• GNU gcc, make, buildutils.

Conventions

MAT is primarily a Unix-based tool, so many of the conventions used here will come from Unix.

We'll show command lines in fixed-width type, in boldface; the system output in response will be in normal face:

% pwd
/home/user/Desktop

Throughout the documentation, we'll refer to the location of the MAT source tree as the variable MAT_PKG_HOME, as in the following command:

% cd $MAT_PKG_HOME

If you received this distribution as a tar or a zip file, MAT_PKG_HOME is the directory src/MAT inside the unpacked zip file. If you checked this distribution out of CVS, it will be the root directory you checked out via "cvs checkout MAT".

All command lines in this documentation are Unix command lines, unless otherwise indicated. The Unix shell assumed is bash. To set the MAT_PKG_HOME variable, do this:

% export MAT_PKG_HOME=<dir>

where <dir> is the appropriate value for MAT_PKG_HOME.

In some cases, you'll see a backslash followed immediately by a line break in command-line examples:

% bin/MATEngine --task 'Named Entity' --workflow Demo --steps 'zone,tokenize' \
--input_file $PWD/sample/ne/resources/data/raw/voa2.txt --input_file_type raw \
--output_file ./voa2_txt.json --output_file_type mat-json

These backslashes and line breaks are not required parts of the command line; they're present simply to enable us to present the command line in a reasonable width. If you type them in the bash shell, they'll work just fine; you'll get a continuation prompt (">") and you can keep typing. But you can omit them.

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 "$MAT_PKG_HOME"
% ls "$PWD"

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

• python-dev
• libx11-dev
• sun-java6-bin
  

Once these packages are installed, you may proceed with the installation, as follows:

• Untar/unzip the distribution (you must have already done that to read this).
• In a terminal window, where <toolkit_dir> is the root directory of the distribution:
  

  % cd <toolkit_dir>
  % ./install.sh
  

During the installation, you might be prompted for various paths and locations which the toolkit requires.

The default version of Python on Ubuntu 9.10 is Python 2.6. This version appears to work just fine. But if you encounter trouble, you have the option (at least at the moment) of installing the python25 and python25-dev packages, and using them instead. This is not completely straightforward, given the nature of the install.sh script; but the simplest solution is to modify the line

inst_pythonbin=`which python`

to

inst_pythonbin=`which python2.5`