Since still I get emails from people asking me what files they need to download and what they need to do to use my programs, I decided to put up this short tutorial. Please email me if you still need help. Oh yeah, and don't assume by emailing me you are bothering me, I like to get emails about my programs (as long as they are friendly).

So first of all, click below on the operating system you are using:

Please note: Throughout this document I use the word "Unix" interchangably with Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOSX, etc. Altho, this is not 100% true, these are Unix-like operating systems and can be used as such.

Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, or XP

A frequent problem I get emailed about is, after going to the download page, the user has no clue what they need to download. So here it is: you need to download the .zip file that is listed under WINDOWS BINARIES. This is probably the only .zip file on the page anyway since the other OS's I support use .tar.gz files typically.

Next you will need to unzip it. I personally recommend Info-Zip unzip but you can use what you want :). Windows XP can unzip it for you without an external program. Simply right-click on the icon and select "Extract All".

People who get this far (and no further) typically email me and say "After unzipping all the files I double click on the icon but all I get is a black box that disappears a 1/2 second later". The reason for this is, most of these programs are command-line only. I also get asked the question of where the installer (setup.exe) is. There is no installer program. When you are tired of my software you can just delete the unzipped directory. It doesn't write anything (that I know of) to that disgusting thing Microsoft likes to call "The Registry". Now there however are graphical interfaces to some of my programs such as asp2php (which there are links on my webpage for) and Naken Chat is supposed to have a box popup and disappear (click here to learn about running Naken chat on Windows), but for the rest you will probably need to use the command prompt.

To get to the command prompt, click on the "Start" button at the bottom left corner of your screen. You will then see a little menu pop up (that looks like the picture below). Select off the menu "Run". A box will come up that says Open: so in that box type: cmd and press the "OK" button. See the pictures below:

Now you should be seeing a little black box with white text where you can type things (like the picture below). The first thing you want to do is a "change directory" command so that your current working directory is the one where you unzipped the program. To change to that directory you need to use the cd command. So for example, if you unzipped Ringtone Tools into a directory (aka. folder) called "C:\Temp\ringtonetools-2.23\ringtonetools-2.23\" you can simply type in the black window: "cd C:\Temp\ringtonetools-2.23\ringtonetools-2.23\" without the quotes of course. After that you can type: "ringtonetools blah.rtttl blah.sckl" to convert an rtttl file called blah into an sckl file. The example of this is in the picture below (along with an asp2php example):

That's it. If you still have problems just email me. Also, if you would like to compile the source code, you can use the instructions below along with the MingW GCC compiler.

Compiling From Sourcecode

This is probably the best option. You'll need to make sure you have a compiler and "make" program on your system. I highly recommend GNU CC and GNU make. I try to make all my program compile and work with other compilers/tools, but I'm not 100% positive they do. Microsoft compilers will most likely not work since they do things like replace strcasecmp with stricmp, altho you can surely try. Personally, I use MingW GCC compiler to compile on Windows. I do have a weird issue with a lot of the programs with Sun's "make" program. It will compile it, but something in my Makefile won't let it be copied to the root directory. You'll have to move it out of the src directory (if there is one) yourself.

Note: If you don't have a compiler, the gcc compiler is offered for many operating systems. Simply install gcc on your system and you should be in good shape.

First step to compiling is downloading the source code. After downloading the source tar.gz file, you need to untar it. Go to a command promopt and type:

tar xvzf myprogram.tar.gz

or if on a Unix system that doesn't have GNU tar/gz, type:

gzip -dc myprogram.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Obviously you need to replace "myprogram.tar.gz" with the name of the file you downloaded. Next you need to "change directories" into the directory that was created after untarring, so next you'll type:

cd myprogram

Again, you need to replace "myprogram" with the actual directory that was newly created. Next step is to build an executable from the source code. Simply type:

make

I know a lot of newer Unix programs have configure scripts, but I tend not to need them. I only have a couple programs that use OS specific libraries, and those typically will autodetect the OS in the Makefiles anyway. If they don't work, you might have to modify the Makefiles. If you're compiling Ringtone Tools or Naken Chat, you can turn some features on and off by changing the Makefiles. If you're compiling Naken Chat you can change the default language of the chat using the "make" program. I have decent docs for that on the Naken Chat homepage.

If you didn't get any errors, you're done. If you did get errors, please email me so I can fix them. Anyway, most of these programs are also "installable" on Unix boxen. In my case, installing only means the executable is copied to /usr/local/bin. You can install these programs by typing:

make install

To do this you probably need to be the "root" user. If you'd like to uninstall, some of these programs can be removed by typing:

make uninstall

Anyway, I think that's all you need to know to compile. If you have any questions please email me so I can update this file to make it more clear.