Installing BurrTools

Downloading BurrTools

BURRTOOLS is an Open Source software project. The most recent release of the program is always available for free download at the BURRTOOLS website:

http://burrtools.sourceforge.net

At the bottom of that page you can select the proper download for your operating system. This will bring you to the download page where you have to select a mirror site to start the downloading. It's highly recommended to select the mirror site on the server nearest to your location.

MICROSOFT WINDOWS users can download either the Windows Binary (a zipped file which needs manual extraction and installation) or the self-extracting Windows Installer. Unless you have a slow connection to the internet, downloading the installer is probably the best option. To use BURRTOOLS on a UNIX platform you have to download the Source files and compile the program on your system (see installation guidelines below). An OSX package is provided.

Installation of BurrTools

Microsoft Windows

If you downloaded the Widows Binary, just extract the file into the directory of your choice and the GUI is ready to be used. If you opted for the Windows Installer, start the executable and follow the instructions on your screen.

Mac OS X

For detailed installation instructions please refer to the manual or help files of your operating system.

Linux / Unix

There are no pre-compiled binaries for Linux available. You have to compile BURRTOOLS yourself. These installation instructions just contain some hints for the compilation of BURRTOOLS. As BURRTOOLS requires a not so widespread library it is not the easiest task to do this.

To install BURRTOOLS for UNIX you first need to make sure you have the following libraries installed: zlib and libpng . These libraries are usually installed on every LINUX system. You just have to make sure that you have installed the development packages, otherwise it is not possible to compile a program that uses these libraries, but just start programs that use them.

Additionally the following library is required: flkt.

Fltk is the library used for the GUI of BURRTOOLS. It may be included in your LINUX distribution or it may not.

The problem is that we need a version of this library that is not compiled with the default switches. This library must be compiled with C++ exceptions enabled. If you don't do this the program will simply shut down when an internal error occurs instead of displaying an error message and making an emergency save. To compile flkt with exceptions enabled you have to do the following:

• Download and decompress as usual
• Run configure just as usual
• Remove -fno-exceptions from the file makeinclude
• Finish normally by calling make and make install

It is of course possible to use a normal version of the fltk library, you just don't get the emergency save feature if there is a bug in the GUI of BURRTOOLS. But as the number of bugs is hopefully quite small right now that should not be such a big problem.

Now BURRTOOLS can be compiled and installed the usual way with configure, make, make install.

Files and Folders

After installing BURRTOOLS the following files should be on your system:

burrGui.exe

The graphical user interface (GUI) to create puzzle files for BURRTOOLS.

UserGuide.pdf

This user guide.

COPYING

A text file containing the GNU General Public Licence. This file may be deleted to save on disk space, but should always be included when sharing the program. Read it carefully before sharing or modifying the program.

AUTHORS

A text file containing information about the contributors to the development of BurrTools. This file may be deleted to save on disk space.

ChangeLog

An automatically created text file containing an overview of the changes made to the program since version 0.0.6. This file may be deleted to save on disk space.

NEWS

A more readable version of ChangeLog. Here all (more or less important) changes to the different versions are collected in a comprehensive list. This is probably the place to look for what changed when downloading a new version. This file may be deleted to save on disk space.

uninstall.exe

The uninstall program will only be added after installing BURRTOOLS with the Windows Installer.

Also a new folder, examples, is created. This subdirectory contains a few examples of existing puzzles that illustrate the capabilities and functions of BURRTOOLS. A brief overview of the examples is presented in the Example section.