NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System User's Guide

How to Install

System Requirements

NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System can be used on most UNIX-based workstations (e.g., Sun SPARC, IBM RS/6000, SGI, DEC).

NOTE: If you are using a Sun workstation with OpenWindows, warnings may be displayed when you start up NCSA Mosaic. They are not serious, and the program should start with no lost functionality. When you have NCSA Mosaic working, go to the Help menu and select the On FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). In the resulting window, select Something is broken. This document addresses the warning messages.

Other Software You Need for Full Functionality

NCSA Mosaic uses external viewers to display the variety of data file formats (images, video, audio, PostScript) on the Internet. For NCSA Mosaic to display these files, the external viewers listed below are recommended. (Other viewers are available and may be used.)

If you need information about installing external viewers, talk with your local system administrator. In general, you need to uncompress, untar, and compile the files obtained from the anonymous FTP servers. Not all viewers work well with all machines. The README file in the software directory usually contains information about hardware compatibility.

Select Manual from the Help menu for additional information about viewers.

ghostview

ghostview is the user interface to the ghostscript viewer for PostScript ``typeset'' documents. ghostview may be obtained from the UIUC anonymous FTP server (uxc.cso.uiuc.edu). Download the following files:

mpeg-play

mpeg-play displays MPEG-format animation sequences and video clips. mpeg-play may be obtained from the University of California at Berkeley's anonymous FTP server (toe.cs.berkeley.edu). Download the following file:

showaudio and metamail

showaudio is a shell script that can play several audio formats on several platforms and is part of the metamail multimedia mail toolkit. metamail processes multimedia documents in the MIME format. Obtain metamail from Bellcore's anonymous FTP server (thumper.bellcore.com). Download the following file (where x refers to the specific version currently available):

xdvi

xdvi is a viewer for documents in the DVI format produced by TeX. The xdvi viewer is available from this anonymous FTP server (ftp.x.org). Download the following file:

xv

xv is an image display and manipulation utility for GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and several other formats of image files. Connect to this anonymous FTP server (ftp.x.org) and download the following file for more information:
National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu