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) 1996-1999 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 If you want to get bigFORTH/MINOS for Linux, get http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/bigforth-{src,bin-libc5,bin-glibc,data,edata,doc}-<date>.tar.bz2 or http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/bigforth-{src,bin-libc5,bin-glibc,data,edata,doc}-<date>.tar.gz You need either the bin-glibc or the bin-libc5 package, depending on your system (a.out is not possible). To find out which system you have, type ldd /bin/bash If the list contains libc.so.5, you have a libc5 based system, if it contains libc.so.6, you have a glibc based system. You find the bzip2 decompress program on http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk/, if you don't have it already (I think that you should). 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-<date>.exe 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: libc5: I use libdl.so.1.9.6 (1.7.14 reportedly doesn't work), libc.5.4.44, libX11.so.6.1, libXext.so.6.3, libXpm.so.4.9, libMesaGL.so.3.0. If you have a configuration that does not work, recompiling the loader usually helps (a simple "rm bigforth.o; make bigforth" does the job). libc5 is really obsolete, better update your system to glibc. I'll stop shipping binaries for libc5 as soon as bigforth.c changes so much that it needs a recompile. 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