PRISM is known to run on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris, including 64-bit variants of these operating systems.
You will need Java, more specifically the Oracle (formerly Sun) version. To run binary versions of PRISM, you only need the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), not the full Java Development Kit (JDK). Currently, we assume you have Java 7 or above (but up until PRISM 4.2, Java 6 actually sufficed). If you don't know what version of Java you have, type java -version from a command prompt.
To compile PRISM from source, you need the Java Development Kit (JDK), GNU make and a C/C++ compiler (e.g. gcc/g++). For compilation under Windows, you will need Cygwin. See below for more information.
To install PRISM on Windows, just run the self-extracting installer which you downloaded. You do not need administrator privileges for this, just write-access to the directory chosen for installation.
If requested, the installer will place shortcuts to run PRISM on the desktop and/or start menu. If not, you can run by PRISM double-clicking the file xprism.bat (which may just appear as xprism) in the bin folder of your PRISM folder. If nothing happens, the most likely explanation is that Java is not installed or not in your path. To check, open a command prompt window, navigate to the PRISM directory, type cd bin, then xprism.bat and examine the resulting error. If you want to create shortcuts to xprism.bat manually, you will find some PRISM icons in the etc folder.
If you wish to use the command-line version of PRISM on Windows, open a command prompt window and type for example:
You can also edit the file bin\prism.bat to allow it to be run from any location. See the instructions within the file for further details.
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
PRISM is known to run on 64-bit versions of Windows. Since we currently only provide 32-bit binary versions, you will need to install and use a 32-bit, rather than 64-bit version of Java. If not, you may see strange error messages like "Can't load IA 32-bit .dll on a AMD 64-bit platform".
You will probably also need to update bin\xprism.bat (and bin\prism.bat, if you use it), changing javaw on the last line to include the full path to the 32-bit executable.
Other than this, installing and running PRISM is as for the 32-bit case described above.
If this is not possible for some reason, an alternative is to build PRISM from source using Cygwin (See below).
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
To ensure compatibility, we recommend that you compile PRISM from source on non-Windows platforms. See below for instructions. However, we do provide pre-compiled binary distributions for Linux (32-bit) and, depending on availability, other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Solaris.
To install a binary distribution, unpack the tarred/zipped PRISM distribution into a suitable location, enter the directory and run the install.sh script, e.g.:
You do not need to be root to install PRISM. The install script simply makes some small customisations to the scripts used to launch PRISM. The PRISM distribution is self-contained and can be freely moved/renamed, however if you do so you will need to re-run ./install.sh afterwards.
To run PRISM, execute either the xprism or prism script (for the graphical user interface or command-line version, respectively). These can be found in the bin directory. These scripts are designed to be run from anywhere and you can easily create symbolic links or aliases to them. If you want icons to create desktop shortcuts to PRISM, you can find some in the etc directory.
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
To compile PRISM form source code, you will need:
To check what version of Java you have, type java -version. To check that you have the development kit, type javac. If you get an error message that javac cannot be found, you probably do not have the JDK installed (or your path is not set up correctly).
Hopefully, you can build PRISM simply by entering the PRISM directory and running make, e.g.:
For this process to complete correctly, PRISM needs to be able to determine both the operating system you are using and the location of your Java distribution. If there is a problem with either of these, you will see an error message and will need to specify one or both of these manually, such as in these examples:
Note the use of double quotes for the case where the directory contains a space. If you don't know the location of your Java installation, try typing which javac. If the result is e.g. /usr/java/jdk1.5.0/bin/javac then your Java directory is /usr/java/jdk1.5.0. Sometimes javac will be a symbolic link, in which case use "ls -l" to determine the actual location.
It is also possible to to set the environment variables OSTYPE and JAVA_DIR directly or edit their values in the Makefile directly. Note that even when you specify JAVA_DIR explicitly (in either way), PRISM still uses the versions of javac (and javah) that are in your path so make sure this is set up correctly.
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
PRISM has also been successfully compiled under Linux on a variety of 64-bit architectures. In general this should work exactly as described above. The Makefile will try to detect that you are compiling on a 64-bit machine but, if this does not work for some reason, you can override detection by setting ARCH to either amd64 (for AMD/Intel 64) or ia64 (for Itanium). For example:
For 64-bit Macs, see below.
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
In most cases, you should be able to build PRISM from source under Mac OS X using the instructions given above. There are, however, a few known issues to be aware of.
The most common problem is when building on recent 64-bit Macs, under which PRISM has some issues with Java. The best advice, currently, is to compile and run a 32-bit version of PRISM. To do this:
If this still does not work, it may be that PRISM is detecting automatically that you are on a 64-bit machine. You can override this as follows:
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
The compilation of PRISM currently relies on a Unix-like environment. On Windows, this can be achieved using the Cygwin development environment (or alternatively using MSYS - see below). Once Cygwin is installed, first ensure gcc, gcc-3 and make are installed, then you can proceed as described in the previous section. Note that the PRISM compilation process uses the MinGW libraries so that the final result is independent of Cygwin at run-time.
One thing to note: make sure you unzip the PRISM distribution from within Cygwin (e.g. using tar xfz prism-XXX-src.tar.gz). Don't use a Windows program (Winzip, etc.) since this can cause problems.
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
Compiling from source in MSYS is less obvious as this environment is currently not directly supported in the makefile. Additionally, MSYS does not handle symlinks in the same way as cygwin does. The first problem is fixed by providing a OSTYPE variable to the makefile, whereas the second problem currently has to be solved manually.
At some point it will fail, saying that it cannot find the CUDD library, this is due to the failing symlinks. We can solve this by means of a few commands:
Problems? See the section "Common Problems And Questions''.
This section describes some of the most common problems and questions related to the installation and running of PRISM. These are grouped into the following categories:
When I try to run PRISM on Windows, I double-click the PRISM shortcut but nothing happens.
The most common cause of this is that you either do not have Java installed or the java executable is not in your path. In any case, to determine the exact problem, launch a command shell and navigate to the bin directory inside the directory where you installed PRISM (you can use the "PRISM (console)" shortcut installed in the start menu to do this). Then, type xprism.bat and see what error message is displayed.
When I try to run PRISM, I get an error of the form:Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: ...
Check:
install.sh from the PRISM directory? (non-Windows platforms)
make clean_all and then re-compile, checking the output (especially at the end) carefully for any error messages.
When I try to run PRISM, I get an error of the form:java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no prism in java.library.path
Check:
install.sh from the PRISM directory? (non-Windows platforms)
make clean_all and then re-compile, checking the output (especially at the end) carefully for any error messages.
Are you on a 64-bit machine? If so, make sure that you are running 64-bit versions of java and javac. (Look for "64-Bit Server VM" in the output of java -version).
When I try to run PRISM, I get an error of the form:Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file
Your version of Java is too old. Update or install a newer version of Oracle Java and then try again.
When I try to run a (Linux) binary version of PRISM, I get an error saying that libstdc++.so.5 cannot be found or libstdc++.so.6 cannot be found.
This is usually due to a discrepancy between the version of Linux that was used to build the binary distribution and the version that you are using to run it.
If the error message is about libstdc++.so.5, you will just need to install an old version of the libstdc++ library. This should be quite easy to find for most Linux distributions. On Fedora Core, for example, just type: yum install compat-libstdc++-33 as root.
If the error message is about libstdc++.so.6, you are running an older version of Linux than the binary release was compiled for. The easiest solution is to compile PRISM yourself from the source code version instead.
When I try to run PRISM, I get an error of the form:Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass(libgcj.so.7)
at prism.PrismSettings.<init>(PrismSettings.java:297)
You are not running the Oracle version of Java. You will need to install it.
When I try to run PRISM, I get an error of the form:java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: libprism: ... cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied
This is likely to be caused by the default settings of SELinux on newer versions of Linux. Open up the "Security Level Configuration" (on Fedora, for example, this is found under "Administration | Security Level and Firewall" under the main menu or by running system-config-securitylevel). Look in the "Compatibility" section of the SELinux Policy settings and make sure "Allow the use of shared libraries with Text Relocation" is ticked. You may need to reboot for changes to take effect.
Do I have to use Oracle's version of Java to build/run PRISM?
Currently, this seems to be the case. We will aim to address this in the future.
When I try to compile PRISM, make seems to get stuck in an infinite loop
This is probably due to the detection of Java failing. Specify the location of your Java directory by hand, e.g. make JAVA_DIR=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0. See the Instructions page for more on this.
When I try to compile PRISM, I get errors of the form:/usr/bin/libtool: for architecture: cputype (16777234) cpusubtype (0) file: -lSystem is not an object file (not allowed in a library)
Are you compiling PRISM on Max OS X? If so, the likely explanation is that you have upgraded to a new version of Mac OS X but have not upgraded the developer tools (eg. XCode). Upgrade and try again.
When I try to compile PRISM, nothing seems to happen
Perhaps you are not using the GNU version of make. Try typing make -v to find out. On some systems, GNU make is called gmake.
When I try to compile PRISM, I get errors of the form:Unexpected end of line seen...
or:make: Fatal error in reader: Makefile, line 58: Unexpected end of line seen...
Perhaps you are not using the GNU version of make. Try typing make -v to find out. On some systems, GNU make is called gmake.
When I try to compile PRISM, I get an error of the form:./setup.sh: line 33: syntax error: unexpected end of file
Are you building on Cygwin? And did you unpack PRISM using WinZip? If so, unpack from Cygwin, using tar xfz (or similar) instead.
When I try to compile PRISM, I get an error of the form:Assembler messages: Fatal error: can't create ../../obj/dd/dd_abstr.o: No such file or directory
Did you unpack PRISM using a graphical tool or file manager? If so, unpack using tar xfz (or similar) instead.
When I try to compile PRISM, I get errors of the form:dirname: extra operand `Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_09/bin/javac' Try `dirname --help' for more information.
This error occurs if the path to your Java distribution contains a space (a common example is when it is somewhere in "Program Files" on Windows). Hopefully, this will be fixed soon. A workaround is to move the java installation to e.g. C:\java.
When I try to compile PRISM, I get an error of the form:/bin/sh: line 43: [: :/cygdrive/c/Program: binary operator expected...
See answer to previous question.
Do I have to use GNU make to build PRISM?
Strictly speaking, no, but you will have to modify the various PRISM Makefiles manually to overcome this.
Can I build PRISM on operating systems other than those currently supported?
PRISM should be suitable for any Unix/Linux variant.
The first thing you will need to do is compile CUDD (the BDD library used by and included in PRISM) on that platform.
Fortunately, CUDD has already been successfully built on a large number of
operating systems. Have a look at the sample Makefiles we provide (i.e. the
files cudd/Makefile.*) which are slight variants of the original Makefile
provided with CUDD (found here: cudd/modified/orig/Makefile). They contain
instructions on how to modify it for various platforms. You can then call
your new modified makefile something appropriate (cudd/Makefile.$OSTYPE) and
proceed to build PRISM as usual. To just build CUDD, not PRISM, type
make cuddpackage instead of make.
Next, look at the main PRISM Makefile, in particular, each place where the
variable $OSTYPE is referred to. Most lines include comments and further
instructions. Once you have done this, proceed as usual.
If you do successfully build PRISM on other platforms, please let us know so we can include this information in future releases. Thanks.
How do I uninstall PRISM?
If you installed PRISM on Windows using the self-extracting installer, you can uninstall it using the option on the start menu. If you didn't add these shortcuts, just run uninstall.exe from the directory where you installed PRISM.
For older versions of PRISM on Windows or on any other platform, simply delete the directory containing it.
The only thing that is not removed via either of these methods is the .prism file containing your PRISM settings which is in your home directory (see the section "Configuring PRISM"). You may wish to retain this when upgrading.
I still have a problem installing/running PRISM. What can I do?
Please post a message in the discussion group (see the support section of the PRISM website).