Information about Downloading and Installing Cvt2Mae







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You may freely download and install the current release of Cvt2Mae.
We recommend downloading the stable current release, however we may
from time to time make available a beta release while we are testing
new features and bug fixes. If you have previously installed Cvt2Mae
and you want to update just the Java .jar file, you can do this as
described in Section 1.3 below. Press the download button to start the
install process.





 Download and Install Cvt2Mae.




 Distribution contents


    

  1. We recommend including the Jave Virtual Machine(JVM) for a
more robust installation.  This will not affect any of your other Java
applications or Web browsers as it is used only with Cvt2Mae.


  2. The distribution includes:






1. Procedure for downloading and installing Cvt2Mae


1.  Click here for the Cvt2Mae
installer download page. This Web page allows you to select the
Cvt2Mae to download for your operating system. If you have problems
downloading the installer with Netscape 4.7x or later, then try
Internet Explorer 5.0. It could be a Mime/type problem with your
browser setup.




2. You start the download process when you click on the installer for
your computer platform. (You may alternatively use the  default installer discussed below.)  Follow
the directions it provides as you download the installer.  It also
provides instructions in the "View" hyperlink adjacent to the
operating system you selected that tells you what to do after you
finished the download. Part of the installation consists of telling
the installer where you want to 1) put the executable installer (a
temporary directory where you have lots of room is a good choice), and
2) the "installation" directory where you will typically leave the
distribution after the installer unpacks it.




We use the commercial 
InstallAnywhere(TM) program to create the installer
which are programs for a vareity of operating systems including:




Other systems will be added as installers become available through
InstallAnywhere (www.ZeroG.com).




1.1 The Default Installer


Alternatively, you can use the default installer that is selected for
your computer. If you want to control where the files are saved
on your computer, then use the explicit installer for your particular
platform described above.


The default installer will put the installer executable in a fixed
directory and the installed Cvt2Mae files in another fixed directory.







1.2 Installation Notes 


Currently, the Windows and Linux installers are robust. We have had
mixed success with Mac OS and Solaris.


Note that the installers (where possible) will include a copy of a
recent Java Virtual Machine (JVM) from InstallAnywhere(TM)
to make running Cvt2Mae on your computer more robust. This is used
locally and only affects the running of Cvt2Mae. It will
not affect any other Java applications on your computer. In the
case of Mac OS, if you have an older version of the MRJ JVM, it will
ask you if you want to upgrade to the newer version (MRJ-2.4.5) -
however you do not have to unless you want to.


The  Cvt2Mae
appendix  describes the details of using the Cvt2Mae converter.
Several PDF tutorials are also available  here.








1.3 Downloading just the Cvt2Mae.jar file after initial install 


If you have previously done an installation. you may avoid a complete
re-installation download by getting just the latest Java Cvt2Mae.jar file. You should replace the
old version of this file on your system with the one you are
downloading. This will work if the new Cvt2Mae.jar file does not
depend on any new entries in the configuration files (which generally
the case - try it and see what happens).






2. Problems installing Cvt2Mae on some operating systems



    

  1.  The MacOS installer is available, but may not work with older
versions of MacOS. In addition, there may be problems if your file
names are longer than 32 characters. For now, the solution is to use
short file names. There may also be problems if your data files have
embedded carriage returns in addition to line feeds. For now, the
solution is to strip the CRs out of the data file.
    



  2.  On Solaris, and possibly other Unix systems, you may have
problems with the stack limits. Do a "man limit" to read about the
command for your particular Unix shell. We have found that the
following seems to work. For the Unix C-shell (csh), add the following
to your .cshrc startup file.


       limit stacksize unlimited

    

In addition, we have set the default stack size that Cvt2Mae uses
to 256Mbytes. If your computer has less physical memory, it will
page. You may also increase this number as well if you have more
memory and want to use it. The solution is to edit the Cvt2Mae.lax
file found where you installed Cvt2Mae. Change the two instances of
memory allocation from 256000000 to a smaller number that is less than
your actual memory size.
    


  3.  On Solaris, if you download the version with the JVM, unless your
Solaris system has been updated recently, it may not be able to find
the libCrun.so.xxx version required by the JVM. Try downloading the
non-JVM version or update your Solaris system.
    


  4. If you have problems with the Sun installer, you may need to
update your Solaris OS system patch set. It is not a single patch.
It is the latest Recommended Patch Cluster from Sun.  We
STRONGLY recommend having your SysAdmin do this for you if you
have not done this before.  Point your Web browser to:


      http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=patches/patch-access

    

and choose the appropriate patch set for the version of Solaris (2.6,
7, or 8) that you are running.  Do not choose any of the x86 versions
unless you are running Solaris x86.  Click on either the Download HTTP
option or Download FTP option, and click the "GO" button to download the
patch set. 
    






2.2 The Cvt2Mae Error Log Files


Each time you run Cvt2Mae, it creates or overides the previous error
log files called StdOutLog.log and StdErrorLog.log in the
installation-directory. If you are experiencing major problems,
these files are useful to us in helping figure out what is
wrong. Otherwise, just ignore them.







2.3 Sun Solaris (or other Unix system) Memory Problems


We have on occasion seen the following types of memory errors. This
discusses how to handle them.





Cvt2Mae Stack size Memory Error on Sun Solaris

 
Running Cvt2Mae on a Solaris (or other Unix system) may produce an error similar to:





  % Cvt2Mae
 
  Stack size of 97664 Kb exceeds current limit of 8192 Kb.
  (Stack sizes are rounded up to a multiple of the system page size.)
  See limit(1) to increase the stack size limit.


 
If the Sun (under Solaris) is slow in loading Cvt2Mae or has memory
errors (shown above) one should first see what the memory limits are
set to on your machine using the "limit" command. If they are too
small they should be increased or set to "unlimited" (see  in 2.4 above 

 



 Cvt2Mae LAX file

If the problems persist, one might have to edit the Cvt2Mae.lax
file found in the Cvt2Mae directory (see example below).  The default
memory settings in the Cvt2Mae.lax file (found in the installation
directory) should be no larger than the total memory of the machine or
paging problems will occur.  For instance, if you have 192Mb of memory
in your Sun, edit the

"lax.nl.java.option.native.stack.size.max" and
"lax.nl.java.option.java.heap.size.max" options to be under
192Mb. You can use any text editor to do this. More memory may be
needed to be installed on your Sun to run Cvt2Mae with very large
datasets.


 


 Default Lax settings 


The Lax file is a startup file generated by InstallAnywhere when we
packaged Cvt2Mae. It is used when Cvt2Mae starts up on your
computer.  We currently set the memory limits to 256Mbytes. If you have more
memory, you can edit the Lax file to have it use more memory.


 
  #   LAX.NL.JAVA.OPTION.JAVA.HEAP.SIZE.MAX
  #   -------------------------------------
  lax.nl.java.option.java.heap.size.max=256000000
 
 
  #   LAX.NL.JAVA.OPTION.NATIVE.STACK.SIZE.MAX
  #   ----------------------------------------
  lax.nl.java.option.native.stack.size.max=256000000 


 













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