System requirements

• Hardware
  • At least 384MB of memory
    • As is the case for a lot of demanding software, more would be better, particularly for Mac OS X
  • Display capable of at least 1024x768 in millions of colors
    • higher resolutions preferred
  • Broadband internet access
    • Pictures are downloaded as needed from a central server, and each is at least 1 megabyte in size, so a modem or cellular connection would be close to unusable. on-campus ethernet connection, image downloads are almost instantaneous.
• Software
  • Java Standard Edition 5 or 6. Java 1.4.x will not work (and note that's the version that typically shipped with Windows XP). The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) should be sufficient if you do not wish to install the full development kit. If you do not yet have java installed, you should be able to get it here.

    Vista Users: We've discovered that there is a problem running VisageMap under Java 6 on Vista. If you don't already have Java installed, I suggest installing Java 5 on Vista. To get Java 5, go here, select either the JDK or JRE, and download the Windows version. If you need Java 6 installed to run some other piece of software, it should be possible to install both versions of Java, telling VisageMap to use Java 5. If you need to do this, contact me for help.

  • Tested operating systems: Linux with a 2.6.x kernel, Windows 2000 and XP, Mac OS X.
    • If you wish to use the SEAS/CETS lab machines, due to a peculiarity to the way the Windows workstations are configured, I strongly recommend using the Linux workstations if have access to them.
    • In order to run the annotation tool on the lab Linux workstations, you will need to make sure java is in your command search path. If the command which java returns nothing or otherwise indicates that the command is not found, add the directory /usr/java/jdk1.5.0/bin to your path. Let me know if you need help doing this.

Downloads

• Linux or Windows zip
  • You will need a to uncompress this file with a unzip command line tool, or one of the hundreds for Windows tools that can open zip archives. You can unpack the distribution wherever you like. After unpacking, you will have a directory named visagemap.
  • On Linux, start a shell session and change directories to the INSTALLDIR/visagemap/bin, where INSTALLDIR is the directory where you unpacked the zip file. Type ./visagemap to start the program. You can also add the INSTALLDIR/visagemap/bin to your command search path so that you can start the program from anywhere.
  • On Windows, navigate to the INSTALLDIR/visagemap/bin and double click on either of visagemap.exe or visagemap_w.exe (the only difference is that the latter version opens a console window which shows messages generated by the Java Virtual Machine).
• Mac OS X dmg
  • Double-clicking the VisageMap.dmg should mount a virtual disk on your desktop. You can drag the application icon to wherever you like.
• Training sample files zip
  • Read the README.TXT inside the zip archive to learn more about the samples and how to use them.

Troubleshooting

Under Linux, this directory is named ~/.visagemap (where ~ conventionally refers to your home directory). Under Mac OS X, it is in Library/Application Support/visagemap under your user directory.

Under Windows, unfortunately, the story is more complicated: it depends on the version of Windows and how it is configured. The easiest way to find out what it is to open the About menu item under the Help menu. Once you open the About window, select the Detail tab. Note the User Dir entry, removing the trailing dev (this trick will work on the other platforms as well).

Once you've identified your configuration directory, call it CONFDIR, the debugging log file is located in CONFDIR/dev/config/MasksLog/visage.log.

I might ask for the Java console log as well. It can be found under CONFDIR/dev/var/log/messages.log.