Amaya 0.9 Alpha Release


About this release
==================

Amaya is intended to be a comprehensive environment for testing and
evaluating new proposals for Web standards and formats. The first version of
this testbed should be available by the end of 1996, but in order to allow
the Web community to evaluate this software and to send feedback to the
development team, an early release is provided now.

This should be considered as a snapshot of a work in progress. A large part
of the intended features of Amaya are implemented, but some of them are not
complete yet and the software is not supposed to be very robust. The user
interface may change and can be improved.


Feedback
--------

As the main objective of this early release is to get feedback from future
users, comments, questions, and bug reports are welcome.

For communicating with the Amaya team, please use the mailing list:

www-amaya@w3.org

For subscribing to the mailing list, send a message to:

www-amaya-request@w3.org

with a body containing the line:

subscribe www-amaya

A history is maintained at the following URL:

http://opera.inrialpes.fr/amaya/messages/


Copyright
---------

Amaya is covered by the MIT and INRIA Copyright Statement. Please read the
file COPYRIGHT carefully before installing Amaya.

How to Install Amaya Binary Release
===================================

Choose a place for Amaya
------------------------

Supposing the binary distribution was loaded fine, one must choose a place
to install it. We suggest

   * /usr/local for a system wide installation
   * the user home directory for a personnal installation

Extract the distribution
------------------------

Move the distribution to this directory, verify the rights on this directory
allows you to create a directory and extract the distribution.

On a Linux ELF platform one must invoke:
tar xvzf amaya-linux-elf.tar.gz

More generally if the distribution is a tar.gz file:
gunzip -c amaya-system.tar.gz | tar xvf -

If this is a tar.Z file:
uncompress -c amaya-system.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Whatever the method used, this should print around 40 lines of output and
create a new directory called Amaya populated with a few files and
directories. If not, your distribution file was probably corrupted during
the transfer, please get a new one. Read carefully the COPYRIGHT file.


Set up the environment and start Amaya
--------------------------------------

The file Amaya/bin/$platform/amaya is executable file Amaya, the
best thing is to add the path to the Amaya/bin/$platform directory to your PATH
environment variable:
 
On a Linux ELF platform 
for a csh or tcsh shell. When using sh, bash or another variant of the
Bourne shell
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/Amaya/bin/LINUX-ELF ; export $PATH

Maybe this command should be added to the .login startup script. Once done
one can lauch amaya simply by typing "amaya" to the shell prompt. The Amaya
main window should open and display the first page of the Amaya
documentation.


If something goes wrong and advice
----------------------------------

* If Amaya doesn't seems to work, ckeck the following:

   1. the DISPLAY variable is correctly set.
   2. The binary just installed is the correct one, i.e. it is the
      correct binaries for the current machine (don't try to start the
      Linux-ELF version on a Solaris machine or an old Linux a.out
      installation).
   3. If the binary version is ok, check the availability of the dynamic
      libraries needed by the executable file Amaya.

      For example on a Linux-ELF platform
      ldd Amaya/bin/LINUX-ELF/amayamain

      and check that there is no missing libraries.

* One can install packages for different platform under the same
 directory (for example on a server filesystem exported via NFS to an
 heterogenous set of machines).

* The Amaya mailing-list is archived:
      http://opera.inrialpes.fr/amaya/messages/

 Please have a look at it before sending mail if something goes wrong.
 Remember, it's an Alpha release.