NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System
Mosaic for X Installation Guide

Mosaic for X Installation Guide

The NCSA Mosaic anonymous FTP distribution site is ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu; program files are in directory /Mosaic.

Executable Binaries

The easiest way to download Mosaic is to retrieve an executable binary from subdirectory Mosaic-binaries. The following binaries are distributed: Mosaic-sun.Z Sun 4, SunOS 4.1.x Mosaic-sun-lresolv.Z Sun 4, SunOS 4.1.x, no DNS Mosaic-sgi.Z Silicon Graphics, IRIX 4.x. Mosaic-ibm.Z IBM RS/6000, AIX 3.2. Mosaic-dec.Z DEC MIPS Ultrix. Mosaic-alpha.Z DEC Alpha AXP, OSF/1. Mosaic-hp700.Z HP 9000/700, HP/UX 9.x To download a binary:
  1. put your FTP session into binary mode (type binary)
  2. pull down the file (type, e.g., get Mosaic-sun.Z)
  3. quit the FTP session
  4. uncompress the binary (type, e.g., uncompress Mosaic-sun.Z)
  5. make the binary executable (type, e.g., chmod 755 Mosaic-sun)
  6. execute the binary.
To download a binary from within Mosaic, go to the Mosaic-binaries directory and turn on Load to Local Disk using the Options menu. Then click on the appropriate filename, and enter a filename into the Save File dialog box. Turn off Load to Local Disk. Perform steps 4-6 above.

Source Code

The complete Mosaic source code distribution is located in subdirectory Mosaic-source. The distribution comes as a single compressed tar file, and can be compiled on most Unix systems. You must have the X11R4 (or later) and Motif 1.1 (or later) header files and libraries on your system to compile Mosaic.

See the README in the source code distribution for more information on compiling Mosaic.

Run-time Problems

There are three problems that you may hit when you run a Mosaic binary for the first time. Click here for more details.

External Viewers

Mosaic assumes the presence of a number of external viewers -- programs that Mosaic can use to allow you to view images, movies, PostScript files, etc. that are retrieved over the network.

See the subdirectory Mosaic-viewers for copies of the normal source distributions of some of these viewers. We strongly recommend downloading and installing these viewers if they do not already exist on your system, as Mosaic will be much more useful with them present. The Frequently Asked Questions list also contains a list of hyperlinks to FTP servers where the default external viewers can be found.

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National Center for Supercomputing Applications
mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu