Getting Started with FXPy
Python
First, you need to have Python installed
on your system in order to use FXPy. Pre-compiled binaries for Linux and
Microsoft Windows are available for download from the Python home page,
and most of the popular Linux distributions include Python as a standard
feature. For other Unix platforms, you can download the source code from
the Python home page, and build it yourself (it's not too hard!)
FOX
Once you've got Python up and running, you may also need to download
the FOX library source code and build and install that. If you're planning
to use FXPy on Microsoft Windows, you can just download the FXPy binary
installer for Windows and skip this step. But for all other Unix-based
installations (including Linux) you're going to need to build and install
FOX first.
The FOX library version must always match the version number for
FXPy!
For the current version of FXPy you need to download version 0.99.131
of FOX!
OK, sorry to shout, but this is a common misunderstanding. Once FOX
1.0 is released and the API settles down a bit this should become less
of an issue. To download the sources for version 0.99.131 of FOX, use one
of these URLs:
and follow the instructions in the INSTALL file of the FOX distribution.
FOX uses the GNU-standard configuration and build process and is pretty
painless to build on most Unix-ish systems.
OpenGL and PyOpenGL
If you are running Windows 95 (earlier than OSR2), you will also
need to download the OpenGL runtime libraries from Microsoft; the URL is
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/mslfiles/opengl95.exe.
You must have these libraries installed even if you don't plan to
do anything OpenGL-related with FXPy. These libraries come as a standard
part of Windows 98 and Windows NT but were not part of Windows 95.
If you are actually interested in developing OpenGL applications with
FXPy, you will also want to get the PyOpenGL
package and install it. This extension allows you to make OpenGL library
calls from your Python scripts.
Distutils
If you need or want to compile FXPy from the sources you will need to have version 0.9.4 or later
of the Distutils installed. Note that the Distutils versions
included with Python 1.6 and Python 2.0b1 were earlier than version 0.9.4 and will not work!
FXPy
Finally, download either the full source code distribution
of FXPy or one of the pre-compiled binary
distributions for Microsoft Windows. You need to choose the appropriate package for your installed version of Python:
If you downloaded and ran the Windows installer, you're ready to take a
look at the test programs; these get installed under the tests
subdirectory of the main installation directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Python\FXPy\tests).
If you downloaded the source distribution, you'll need to read the instructions
on how to build FXPy directly from the source code.
Last Update: $Date: 2000/09/29 13:06:45 $