Installation: Linux, Apple, UNIX

There are two ways to install MView.

Either method can be used by an ordinary user installing into their own account, or by a system administrator installing onto a computer with multiple users. It is assumed that Perl is already installed and on your PATH.

Installer script

The installer program should work on all systems, but is new and relatively experimental.

You unpack the archive into a destination folder and run the installer from there, following the instructions. You may have to edit PATH afterwards.

Explanation: the installer puts a small mview driver program into a folder on PATH so that it can be run easily by the user. The driver knows the location of the unpacked MView folder and starts the real MView program.

  1. Save the archive to somewhere under your home folder then uncompress and extract it:

    tar xvzf mview-VERSION.tar.gz

    This creates a sub-folder mview-VERSION containing all the files.

  2. Change to this folder.

  3. Run the command:

    perl install.pl

    and follow the instructions. You will be offered various places to install the driver script.

    If you know in advance the name of the folder you want to use for the driver script, you can supply it on the command line:

    perl install.pl /folder/on/my/path

  4. If the installer couldn’t find a sensible place to install the driver, it chooses ~/bin and you will have to add that to your PATH, then rehash or login again.

Manual install

This works on all systems and is the most basic, but requires that you do a little editing.

You unpack the archive into a destination folder, edit the MView program by hand, then add the folder containing that program to PATH.

  1. Save the archive to your software area, for example, /usr/local, then uncompress and extract it:

    tar xvzf mview-VERSION.tar.gz

    This creates a sub-folder mview-VERSION containing all the files.

  2. Change to this folder.

  3. Edit the file bin/mview.

  • Set a valid path for the Perl interpreter on your machine after the #! at the top of the file, for example:

    #!/usr/bin/perl

  • Find the line:

    $MVIEW_HOME = "/path/to/mview/unpacked/folder";

    and change the path, in our example, to:

    $MVIEW_HOME = "/usr/local/mview-VERSION";

  • Save the file.

  1. Finally, make sure that the bin folder containing the mview script (that you just edited) is on the user PATH, then rehash or login again.

    In our example, you would add /usr/local/mview-VERSION/bin to the existing value of PATH, or replace any older MView path.

How to set PATH

The PATH environment variable is a list of : (colon) separated folders containing programs. When you type the name of a program at the command prompt, the system searches these folders, in order, until it finds the program and runs it (or complains if the program can’t be found).

Assume you are adding /opt/bin as the directory containing the newly installed mview script. On all systems the PATH environment variable would be extended by adding /opt/bin to the existing PATH value using colon delimiters as needed. You can prepend the new path (it will be searched first for commands), insert it somewhere in the middle, or append it at the back (it will be searched last).

Most people are using bash or a related shell. The PATH environment variable is set globally for all users by the system. You can modify it for your account by editing or creating if necessary your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile file. You might see a line like:

PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

so change it, in this example, to:

PATH="$HOME/bin:/opt/bin:$PATH"

Here we’ve inserted it somewhere in the middle, after a path in the user’s account, but before the system paths, and that will be the program search order.

On all systems, once you’ve updated the PATH variable, login again and the mview command should be recognised, so that running:

mview -help

prints the help message for the new version.

Note: if you already have an older mview installed on the PATH and append the new location at the back of PATH, the older program will still be found first whenever you try to run mview, so be aware of that; you would need to delete the old version, or rearrange the PATH order.

Finally, if you are root or can sudo -i with root privileges you can set PATH globally for all users, but details are system specific and you already know what to do anyway.