72.10 Installation of GAP for Windows

Installing GAP under 32-bit Windows should be fairly easy. Get the Windows-specific files described in Getting GAP and decide into which directory you want to install GAP 4.2. GAP will be installed in a subdirectory gap4r2 of this directory. (You can still later move GAP to a different location.)

The following installation example assumes that you are installing GAP on a Pentium machine under Windows 95.

Note that certain parts of the output in the examples should only be taken as rough outline, especially file sizes and file dates are not to be taken literally.

If you encounter problems please also see section If Things Go Wrong of this document.

Open a window with the MS-DOS prompt and go to the directory where you want to put GAP.

Get the distribution gappc4r2.zoo and the Windows version of the zoo archive extractor unzoo.exe.

(The zoo archives we provide for GAP contain comments which indicate whether files are text or binary files. The unzoo we provide uses these comments to translate the ``LF'' line exndings we use to the Windows style ``CRLF''. If you use another zoo extractor you might lose this information and end up with files that might not conform to your operation system standards.)

How you can get those files is described in the section Getting GAP. Remember that the distribution consists of binary files and that you must transmit them in binary mode.

Now unpack the distribution with the command

C:\GAP> unzoo -x gappc4r2.zoo
gap4r2\bin\gap.bat -- extracted
gap4r2\doc\aboutgap.tex -- extracted
gap4r2\doc\aggroup.tex  -- extracted
[many more lines]

If you got not the full distribution file but several small files, extract all of them (except the bug fixes and share packages!) in this way.

(Afterwards you will not need the file gappc4r2.zoo any longer. If you are short of disk space you can remove it now.)

C:\GAP> del gap4r2.zoo

Now go in the directory gap4r2 If you got any bug fixes (there are none in the initial release but doubtlessly some will follow. You can find them in the bugfixes directory on out ftp server.) extract these there. (The bug fixes extract only on this level to make them applicable even if you chose later to rename the root directory of your GAP distribution.)

If there is more than one fix file, first unpack fix1, then fix2, an so on.

C:\GAP> cd gap4r2
C:\GAP\GAP4R2> ..\unzoo -x ..\fixXX4r2.zoo
[again extraction information]

If you got any share packages, extract them in the pkg subdirectory in the same way.

The directories tbl, tom, trans, small and prim contain data libraries. If you are short of disk space you can erase some of them, but then of course you will not be able to access this data.

We provide a precompiled binary in the bin subdirectory, so there is no need to compile GAP yourself.

The provided binary should work under Windows9x and Windows NT.

Now go to the main GAP directory and call the batch file instwin.bat:

C:\GAP\GAP4R2> instwin.bat
echo Installation completed.
echo To start GAP 4 use the file C:\GAP\GAP4R2\bin\gap.bat'.

(If you get an error ``out of environment space'' at this point, see the section on problems at the end of this document for a remedy.)

If your version of Windows uses a language other than English (this is a misdesign in Windows which does not offer a portable way to obtain the current directory), you must now edit the file gap.bat in the bin directory to put in the correct path.

C:\GAP\GAP4R2> edit bin\gap.bat

C:\GAP\GAP4R2\bin\gapw95.exe -m 14m -l C:\GAP\GAP4R2; %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8

In order to test your installation now start GAP (from the main GAP directory). You should get the GAP banner and then the GAP prompt. (The process of starting GAP may take a little while.)

C:\GAP\GAP4R2> bin\gap
[... lines deleted]
gap>

Try a few things to see if the binary works.

gap> 2 * 3 + 4;
10
gap> Factorial( 30 );
265252859812191058636308480000000
gap> Size( SymmetricGroup( 10 ) );
3628800
gap> Factors( 10^42 + 1 );
[ 29, 101, 281, 9901, 226549, 121499449, 4458192223320340849 ]
gap> m11 := Group((1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11),(3,7,11,8)(4,10,5,6));;
gap> Size( m11 );
7920
gap> Factors( 7920 );
[ 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 11 ]
gap> Length( ConjugacyClasses( m11 ) );
10 

Especially try the command line editing and history facilities, because they are probably the most machine dependent feature of GAP.

Note that GAP is developed under UNIX and therefore the key commands are rather UNIX-type then Windows type. We try also to recognize some common Windows key commands such as the arrow keys, but it is likely that not all Windows-special key commands will be recognized: in general GAP will not conform to standard Windows ``look-and feel''.

Enter a few commands and then make sure that ctr-P redisplays the last command, that ctr-E moves the cursor to the end of the line, that ctr-B moves the cursor back one character, and that ctr-D deletes single characters. So, after entering the above commands, typing

ctr-P ctr-P ctr-E ctr-B ctr-B ctr-B ctr-B ctr-D 1 return

should give the following lines:

gap> Factors( 7921 );
[ 89, 89 ] 

Finally you might want to copy the file gap.bat into a directory in your search path (for example the DOS directory) as gap.bat (or gap4.bat if you also have GAP 3 running on the same machine) to be able to start GAP by its name from any location:

C:\WINDOWS> gap

You might want to enable cut-and-paste in the GAP window and select a more pleasant icon. You can find details on how to do this on the web page http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~gap/Info4/windows.html

A set of test files is provided, running them all takes some 60 minutes on a Pentium Pro 200 Mhz. As a quick test we start combinat.tst first.

gap> Filename( DirectoriesLibrary("tst"), "combinat.tst" );
"./tst/combinat.tst"
gap> ReadTest(last);
+ $ld: combinat.tst,v 4.7 1997/11/21 10:19:47 ahulpke Exp $
+ GAP4stones: 26801
true

Note that GAP internally uses / to separate directory names. This will be translated to backslashes for the operating system.

Now you can use Read (not ReadTest) to read the file testall.g to run all available test files. This is not a necessary part of the installation, it only serves as a confirmation that everything went OK. The full test suite takes some time (almost 2 hours on a Pentium III/500) and uses quite a bit of memory, so you may wish to skip this step or run only part of the tests. This does no harm)

To run the complete test you will need to start GAP with about 100MB of memory, although most of it will run in less. (You should not pay too much attention to the GAPstone ratings of the different files. The time measurements are not calibrated and sometimes vary substantially because further tests have been added to a file.)

gap> Filename( DirectoriesLibrary("tst"), "testall.g" );
"./tst/testall.g"
gap> Read(last);
[lines omitted]
test file     GAP4stones   time(msec)
-------------------------------------------
[further lines omitted]

You can ignore warnings from weakptr.tst, which stem from garbage collections occurring at different times, and those from grpconst.tst which stem from differences in available share packages.

The information about the manual is system independent, you can find it in section The Documentation.

A few final reminders: Make sure that you got and installed all bugfixes. We would appreciate if after installation you could send us a short note at gap@dcs.st-and.ac.uk (even if you had installed GAP3 before). We also suggest that you subscribe to our gap-forum mailing list, see the GAP web pages for details.

Thats all, the installation is complete. We hope that you will enjoy using GAP. If you have problems, do not hesitate to contact us at gap-trouble@dcs.st-and.ac.uk.

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