Disclaimer
^^^^^^^^^^
  This software is supplied without any warranty of any kind.
  Permission to use this software is granted only if the user accepts full
  responsibility for any damages arising from its use. In no circumstances 
  the authors will be held liable for any damages arising from the use 
  of this software as loss of data, corruption of computer systems, 
  business interruption, etc.

System Requirements and Program Installation
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
All programs of the present collection are written in C++
and are able to run under the operating systems
Linux as well as Windows.
Open source software libraries have been used as described below.

System Requirements
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The programs are designed to run with following system requirements:

 CPU: 80486 processor or higher
 Operating systems:
     Windows 2000 or higher 
     Linux (note, however, the remarks below)
 System memory: 16 MB or more
 Disk space: ca. 15 MB
 A screen resolution of 800x600 or higher is recommended. 
 A screen color-depth of 16 bit or more is recommended. (At least for 
     Mandelbrot. The other programs will work fine even with 8 bit).
 A mouse is required to control the programs.

Installing the Programs
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The content of the CD is organized as followed:
  
  The folder chaos_windows contains the programs for the Windows operating system.
  
  There is an installer program install_chaos.exe for the Windows operating system.

  The tar-archive chaos_linux.tar.bz2 contains the programs for the Linux operating system.

Windows Operating System
------------------------
Under Windows you have several possibilities:
 
  You can run the programs direct from the CD. They are located in the sub-folder
  chaos_windows. This has the disadvantage, however, that changes to supplied data 
  files can not be saved.
 
  You can manually copy the chaos_windows folder to your hard-disk.
 
  You can use the installer install_chaos.exe. Follow the instructions on the screen.
  Normally the programs are transferred to Programs\Chaos and appropriate start menu 
  entries are created. An uninstaller is provided, too.

The CD has no auto-run functionality. You are required to open the CD manually.
(Look at the workplace folder on the desktop and open the CD-drive.)


Linux Operating System
----------------------
Due to the diversity of Linux distributions and lack of a common standard there
is no guarantee that the Chaos-programs run under Linux and perform correctly.

You could either use wine to run the Windows programs directly. But this approach
is known to be error-prone. Many strange and unwanted things can happen depending on
the wine version used.

It is recommended to use the native Linux binaries. Minimum system required are an 
elf-format based system, glibc of at least version 2.2.5 (with pthread),
kernel of at least 2.4, XFree86 of at least 4.2 (or similar) and bash.

The following steps are necessary to use the Linux binaries:

  Create a folder in your home-directory and copy chaos_linux.tar.bz2 from the CD
  to this folder.

  Untar the archive in this folder. To do this, open a console and run 
  tar xvfj chaos_linux.tar.bz2.

  Now you can run the programs from this folder. To do this, open a console, change
  to this folder and start the programs by invoking the shell-scripts. For example, 
  to run 3Disk, type ./3disk.sh. The executable files (for example 3disk.exe) can not 
  be started directly. This is different from the Windows operating system. The other 
  programs are started similarly. If you use a program like Konqueror, click on the 
  shell scripts to start a program.

  If you want to install the programs for all users, untar the archive in a folder like
  /opt/chaos and give all users appropriate access to this folder. If desired, create 
  symbolic links from the shell-scripts in this folder to /usr/local/bin or a similar
  folder. Then it should be possible to start 3Disk by simply typing 3disk.sh in the
  console regardless of the current working directory.
