Windows XP
We recommend having at least 1GB RAM and not using older Windows
operating systems than XP. We suggest that you run the FEEDS
evaluation suite before starting to do your own analyses.
One option for running FSL under Windows is to install Linux inside
an emulator - for example, VMware works really well, and allows you to run
Linux inside Windows; you can then install and run a linux version of
FSL inside the Linux. Or you could setup your windows computer as
dual-boot, with both Windows and Linux installed, and boot into Linux
for your data analysis.
Alternatively, FSL can run natively under Windows XP once you have
installed a free package called Cygwin, which is a unix-like
environment running inside Windows. Programs that run under Cygwin are
real native Windows programs but typically run within the unix-like
directory structure that lives in C:\cygwin, which is accessible to
all Windows programs. Please note that we cannot offer any support
relating to the installation or running of Cygwin!
Cygwin is (normally) extremely easy to install, but unfortunately
the latest Cygwin distribution is broken at present - it doesn't work
correctly with the latest TCL/TK/Tix, which FSL uses for the
GUIs. Therefore it is necessary, if you don't already have Cygwin
installed, to install a slightly older version of Cygwin. The
following steps are pretty easy - hopefully Cygwin will get fixed soon
and we can revert to the easier default Cygwin installation!
- Download the disk image (basically a single-file copy of the
original install CD) of the December 2005 build of Cygwin - save
it to your Windows desktop.
- Annnoyingly, Windows can't read disk images, so you will now need
a third-party program in order to be able to mount the Cygwin disk
image as if it were a mounted CD. We've tried the following freeware
and it seems to work ok and is pretty easy. Go to Daemon
Tools, click on "Downloads" then "Daemon Tools" then the "DAEMON
Tools 4.0 X86" link - run this setup script. After it reboots windows,
the installation program asks you to click "Run" so it can finish the
installation. If you accept all the defaults it should start the
Daemon and a new icon appears in the bottom-right icon tray.
- Right-click on the red Daemon icon in the tray, go to "Virtual
CD/DVD-ROM -> Device 0: -> Mount image" and then select the Cygwin
file from your Desktop. Now if you go to "Start -> My Computer" you
should see the Cygwin file mounted as if it's a DVD drive. Open it and
then click on the black+green Setup icon to start the Cygwin setup.
- Press "Next" then "Install from Local Directory". Accept the
various following questions until it brings up the "Select Packages"
list.
- Once the list of packages appears, next to "All" there is the word
"Default". Click once on the word "Default" and
wait....it may take several minutes to change all the "Default"
settings to "Install". This then means that you get all packages, and
not just the default ones. Then press "Next" twice and wait whilst all
of Cygwin installs....this may take an hour or more.
- You probably now want to uninstall the Daemon Tools.
You now have Cygwin installed and should have a Cygwin icon on the
desktop which opens a unix-like shell where you can type commands. You
are now ready to install FSL:
- Assuming that you have downloaded the FSL distribution file onto
your desktop, use a Windows file browser to move this file into
C:\cygwin\usr\local
- In the Cygwin terminal:
- cd /usr/local
- tar xvfz fsl-*.tar.gz (don't use WinZip to do this
unpacking - it can corrupt the files!)
- echo 'export FSLDIR=/usr/local/fsl; . ${FSLDIR}/etc/fslconf/fsl.sh; export PATH=${FSLDIR}/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
(make sure you type that EXACTLY including the "." and the spacing!!)
- Now close the terminal. Again using a Windows file browser, move
file C:\cygwin\usr\local\fsl\FSL.lnk onto your Desktop - this should
give you a new icon which starts the FSL GUI.
To customise FSL for particular ouput datatypes etc., see the
page on Customising FSL.