Installation Instructions

These instruction are adapted to the current format of the snapshot distribution. This format will evolve, and hopefully jMax will be packages in standard debian or rpm format in the future.

A jMax snapshot, to be downloaded from the project sourceforge site. Please note that distributions are OS and architecture specific. jMax Phoenix packaging do not support multi architecture distributions.

The name of the release file is composed by the OS name, the architecture jMax was compiled for and the revision number of the snapshot; for example: jmax.Linux.x86_64.r107.tgz.

You need a Java virtual machine installed, version 1.6 or later. The Sun virtual machine work well, the openJDK 1.6 works well, but early versions have some bug here and there, so be sure to have the latest version, and report the JVM you are using in case of troubles.

For the time being, you need to be sure to have the portaudio and portmidi library .so installed; you may install the version coming with your distribution, or the latest that you can find in the port audio web site.

For development, you need also to install the development packages of these libraries.

Refer to your distribution for instructions; on Ubuntu, you can simply use Synaptic to install Java.

Note for developers:At the moment, the distribution do not include the header files needed to compile a jMax object. You need to check out the sources from the project svn to be able to compile objects.

jMax is distributed as a tar gzip'ed file. After downloading the jMax distribution file (for instance jmax.free.linuxpc.2.3.12.tar.gz), you will need to execute the following:

• Untar the package in the directory where you want to install jMax, typically /usr/local:

• For example: tar xvzf jmax.Linux.x86_64.r107.tgz. This will create the jmax directory; you are free to rename it if you want to track version numbers.

• Current snapshot releases are for evaluation only, compiled without optimisation, so it is not worth to set the permission to be able to run at real time priorities. Instructions to do so will be given in the future once worth doing.

The create jmax directory contains the following directories and files:

• jmax: the jmax executable script. Run this script to start jmax.
• config: contains the configuration files for this installation.
• docs: contains (will contains) some documentation, readme file and so on
• examples: contains some examples, patches or configuration examples.
• images: contains the images used by jMax
• bin: contains the core jMax executable
• tcl: contains the core jMax tcl code
• packages: contains all the packages distributed with the core jMax

Run the jmax script from the distribution. For the various command line options, see this page .