Installation

The PTF library is the core component of the framework. Here you find all parts to build a test. This includes:

• task definitions
• task sequencing
• task scheduling
• input handling
• timing of user reactions and execution times

However before you can use this features the library has to be installed on your system. This is quite straight forward. Please note that you have to have root privileges to access the directories where the library will be installed to. You can become root with the su command and giving the right password when asked.

First go to the download page to get the latest source code or binary package, if you do not have it already.

This section is divided into the following sections:

• Compiling from source on Linux
• Installing the binaries on Linux
• Compiling from source on MacOSX
• Installing the binaries on MacOSX
• Tools used to develop ptf-lib

Compiling from source on Unix

If you downloaded the source distribution, you need at least the following to build the library:

• The GNU library commoncpp
• libSDL .

Compilation is now done by performing the following steps:

1. Unpack the archive, unless you already have done that:

       gunzip ptflib-$VERSION.src.tar.gz    # uncompress the archive
       tar xf ptflib-$VERSION.src.tar       # unpack it
   

2. Compile the program by running make:

       make
   

   The program should compile without problems and the library (libptf.so) should be available in the lib directory of the distribution.

3. Optional: Generate the user manual.

       make doc
   

   To let doxygen generate the HTML documentation.

   Note:

   You will need the stream editor sed for this, but this should be available on any Unix platform.

   The HTML directory of the distribution will now contain the html documentation (just point a HTML browser to the file index.html in the html directory).

Installing the binaries on Linux

After the compilation of the source code do a make install to install ptf. If you downloaded the binary distribution for Unix, type:

    make install

Binaries are installed into the directory <prefix>/bin. Use make install_docs to install the documentation and examples into <docdir>/doxygen.

<prefix> defaults to /usr but can be changed with the --prefix option of the configure script. The default <docdir> directory is <prefix>/share/doc/packages and can be changed with the --docdir option of the configure script.

Alternatively, you can also copy the library from the lib directory manually to some lib directory in your search path. This is sufficient to use ptf.

If you have a RPM or DEP package, then please follow the standard installation procedure that is required for these packages.

Compiling from source on MacOSX

Here is what is required:

• libSDL for MacOSX. This can be downloaded from: http://www.libsdl.org

• To generate LaTeX documentation or formulas in HTML you need the tools: latex and dvips.

  For your information, the LaTeX is freely available set of so called macros and styles on the top of the famous TeX program (by famous Donald Knuth) and the accompanied utilities (all available for free). It is used for high quality typesetting. The result -- in the form of so called DVI (DeVice Independent) file -- can be printed or displayed on various devices preserving exactly the same look up to the capability of the device. The dvips allows you to convert the dvi to the high quality PostScript (i.e. PostScript that can be processed by utilities like psnup, psbook, psselect, and others). The derived version of TeX (the pdfTeX) can be used to produce PDF output instead of DVI, or the PDF can be produced from PostScript using the utility ps2pdf.

Installing the binaries on MacOSX

There are no binaries for MaxOSX at the moment.

Tools used to develop PTF

PTF was developed and tested under Linux using the following open-source tools:

• GCC
• GNU make
• CVS

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