# Installing the LDPC Software

The LDPC software is written in C, and may well work with any C compiler, though it has been tested only with gcc, in Unix and Linux environments, and in the Cygwin Unix-like environment that runs under Microsoft Windows. The installation instructions below assume that you are using a Unix-like system.

All the software, including the documentation you are viewing here, is contained in a tar file, which you can download by clicking one of the options below:

> Tar file of LDPC software (0.9 Megabytes)
> Gzipped tar file of LDPC software (0.4 Megabytes)

Once you obtain the tar file (and uncompress it with gunzip if necessary), you should extract the files with the following Unix command:

>     tar xf LDPC-yyyy-mm-dd.tar

This will create a source directory called `LDPC-yyyy-mm-dd`, and place all the source, documentation, and other files in this directory.

If you prefer for this directory to be called something else, rename it now, before compiling the programs, since the file `randfile` in this directory, containing natural random numbers, is accessed according to its path when the programs were compiled.

Once the tar command above has finished, you should change into the newly-created directory, and type

>     make

If all goes well, this should compile all the programs (except for some test programs, which can be compiled with `make test`). You may want to edit the file `Makefile` before running `make` in order to change compilation options, such as the optimization level.

You can run the programs from this source directory, or you can copy them to some other directory by running the `LDPC-install` shell file. For instance, to install them in a bin directory in your home directory, do the following:

>     ./LDPC-install $HOME/bin

The source directory contains a copy of all the HTML files documenting the software, such as the one you are reading now, with the file `index.html` being the starting point. It is best to use this local copy when referring to the documentation, rather than get it off the web, since that is faster and also insures that the documentation is for the version that you are using. Just tell your browser to open the URL

>     file:path-to-software/index.html

where `path-to-software` is the full path (starting with "/") to the directory where you've put the software.

The command

>     make clean

will remove all the compiled programs, as well as the files created when the examples are run, and `core`, if it exists.

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