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| Topographica is currently under very active development, with many changes made daily. Developers, users who plan to modify any of the source files, and users who wish to receive frequent updates, should obtain Topographica using CVS (the version control system used for managing Topographica development), as detailed below. Alternatively, installation packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh at our Sourceforge downloads page. These packages simplify the process of installation (at the cost of making it slightly more difficult to upgrade to new versions). Linux and Mac users should download the desired archive package and then follow the 'Building Topographica' instructions below; Windows users can download and run an .exe file, which will perform all the necessary steps. Installing using CVSTopographica is hosted by SourceForge.net, which maintains the CVS repository. The essentials for using CVS at SourceForge are described below; see the SourceForge documentation for more details or if you have any difficulties. To get started, first change to a directory to which you have write access with sufficient space available, i.e., about 400 megabytes as of 2/2006. There are two ways to get your own local copy of the CVS files, depending on whether or not you are an official Topographica developer. Non-developers can check out a read-only version of the repository, while developers have read/write access so that they can make changes that become a permanent part of the project repository. Please follow the appropriate set of instructions below. Read-only accessFor read-only access from UNIX, Mac, or Cygwin (Windows with Unix commands installed), log in to the CVS server using the command: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@topographica.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/topographica loginWhen a password is requested, just press return. Then change to wherever you want the files to be stored, and use the command: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@topographica.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/topographica checkout -P -r LATEST_STABLE topographica(where the entire command should be on a single line, even though it is broken into two lines above). This process will likely take several minutes (probably appearing to hang at certain points), as there are some extremely large files involved. The -r
LATEST_STABLE option selects the version that has most recently
been declared to pass all tests. That option can be omitted if you
want the absolutely most up-to-date version, which may not always be
usable due to work in progress.
In Windows without Cygwin, you can retrieve the files using
TortoiseCVS (tested 2/2006
using TortoiseCVS 1.8.25). After installing TortoiseCVS, open the
Windows directory where you want the files to be located on your
machine, right click, select "CVS Checkout", fill in CVSROOT as
Read/write accessFor developers wanting read/write access, no login step is needed. However, you may need to tell CVS to usessh, because
most systems default to rsh, yet rsh is almost never supported in practice.
Just type export CVS_RSH=ssh for sh/bash or
setenv CVS_RSH ssh for csh/tcsh; you may wish to put this
in your shell startup file. The checkout command is then:
cvs -d ':ext:uname@topographica.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/topographica' checkout topographicawhere uname should be replaced with your SourceForge.net username. You will be asked for your SourceForge.net password. If instead you get a message about rsh timing out, you have probably forgotten to do the CVS_RSH command. The LATEST_STABLE option can also be provided as above, but developers will more likely want the most up-to-date version for editing. Windows users can use the read-only procedure described
for TortoiseCVS above, replacing CVSROOT with
Note that anyone interested in Topographica is welcome to join as a Topographica developer to get read/write access, so that your changes can become part of the main distribution. Just email Jim and describe what you want to do, and he'll tell you what to do from there. Problems with CVS?Sometimes the SourceForge.net cvs service experiences problems. If you receive messages such as "connection closed by remote host", or the cvs connection times out, you may wish to check the SourceForge.net status page. Be aware that this page is not always updated as fast as problems appear.Building TopographicaThetopographica directory you have now checked out
includes the files necessary to build Topographica on most platforms.
To make the build process simpler for developers using multiple
platforms, source code versions of the libraries needed are included,
and are created as part of the build process. This approach makes the
initial compilation time longer and the simulator directory larger,
but it minimizes the changes necessary for specific platforms and
operating system versions.
Linux:
To build Topographica under Linux, just type If all goes well, a script named UNIX:
Topographica is developed under Linux, but should work on other
versions of UNIX as well, as long as they have standard GNU tools like
make and GCC installed. Just follow the Linux instructions, replacing
Mac: Topographica builds only under Mac OS X or later. These instructions assume that you have an X server installed. It is also possible to build Topographica using a native (Aqua) version of Python, which looks a bit nicer, but we have not yet documented how to do that. To install under Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger):
Other OS X versions may require small changes to this procedure, to make sure that compatible libraries are available. Windows: Double click on setup.bat in the Topographica directory. After installation, '.ty' files are associated with Topographica. Follow the instructions below for running Topographica (from a command prompt), or double click on one of the .ty scripts in the examples directory. Instead of using the Windows versions of the various support tools for Topographica, it should be possible to build Topographica on Cygwin, but it may be necessary to modify some of the makefiles. Running TopographicaOnce you have the code installed and built, go to your topographica/ directory and type e.g.:./topographica -g examples/cfsom_or.tyor ./topographica -g examples/hierarchical.tyor ./topographica -g examples/som_retinotopy.tyor ./topographica -g examples/lissom_oo_or.ty(Windows users should omit the initial ./, and replace the
second / with a backslash \)For the latter two examples, a good way to get started is to work through the SOM or LISSOM tutorials. Updating TopographicaCVS users who have Topographica checked out can update to the latest stable version at any time by doing:cd topographica cvs update -d -P -r LATEST_STABLE make all If you want the very most recent version, stable or not, replace
Note that updating the external/ subdirectory sometimes takes a long time, if some of the external packages have been upgraded, and in that case "make all" can also take some time to build. Users of Topographica who don't use CVS (having downloaded one of the archive or binary packages) can subscribe to the topographica-announce mailing list to hear about updates. |
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