This is a small introduction to MINOS pre-beta. It's not intented as
manual, it just helps you to see MINOS work.

MINOS and bigFORTH are copyrighted work, (c) 1996-2002 by Bernd
Paysan. You may copy MINOS under the GPL version 2 (see file COPYING),
with the restriction that you must add your name to the CREDITS file,
if you changed things. You can get the official distributions from

http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/bigforth.html
http://bigforth.sourceforge.net/

If you want to get bigFORTH/MINOS for Linux, get

http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/bigforth-<version>.tar.bz2

or one of the mirrors at Sourceforge

Get also bigforth-pattern-<version>.tar.bz2 if you want background
styles, and bigforth-edata-<style>-<version>.tar.bz2 for Enlightenment
styles (scaled pixmaps).

To install MINOS, unpack all packages into a directory of your
choise. MINOS will unpack into a subdirectory called "bigforth". cd to
that directory, and type "make install". This will install bigFORTH in
the /usr/local hierarchy. Source and data files are in
/usr/local/lib/bigforth and subdirectories, the executables in
/usr/local/bin. You find configure files in
/usr/local/lib/bigforth/*.cnf, copy them to your homedirectory to
adjust pathes.

If you want to run bigFORTH from another directory, edit the Makefile
variable INSTDIR and BININSTDIR, and remake the system (type "rm
bigforth; make"). You still have to adjust the pathes in the *.cnf
files.

If you want to run MINOS on Windows 95/NT, get

http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/bigforth-<version>.exe

or one of the mirrors at Sourceforge

and double-click on that file. This is a self-extracting archive, that
installs as other Windows programs.



MINOS consists of two parts: a widget library (also called MINOS), and
an editor, the tool to master MINOS, called Theseus. To load MINOS,
start "xbigforth" and click on "Theseus" in the "File" menu.

This opens Theseus. To arrange objects, MINOS uses a box&glue
model. Each dialog starts with a box (usually a vertical box, vbox,
you can change this with the "horizontal" button in the box
inspector); add all the widgets you want there. To navigate within the
boxes (one box is the current box), use the four cursor buttons in the
icon bar, or click on the box.

The top three icons select the editing mode: Text/Code/Name, Cut/Paste
and Try. The four icons below change the appending order of new
objects: First in the current box, last in the current box, before the
current object, after the current object. The three lower icons allow
you to load, save and execute the current form. Another "designer
open" in the dialog window opens another incarnation of Theseus.

There is a help file, which explains a bit more detailed how to use
Theseus. You can view the help with your favourite HTML browser, set
the shell variable BROWSER accordingly. Default is
"netscape". "kdehelp" works fine, too.

MINOS isn't finished, so don't expect everything to work.

To see some of MINOS features, type "include testwidgets.str" in the
dialog window, or "include gears.m gears open".



Known problems:

If you get errors like "Bus Error" or so, type .except (and return),
and look at the instruction's address. If it's in a library, update
it. Start xbigforth and type "cat /proc/<xbigforth's pid>/maps" from
the shell prompt to find out where the librarys are mapped, type
"modules" from the xbigforth prompt to find out where bigFORTH mappes
it's own modules. This eases my job if you report me a bug.

More informations about MINOS can be found in the article

http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/minos-eng.ps.gz