Installing Minion

The main Minion website is http://github.com/minion/minion/, and this contains links to the download page. Currently, executables with and without debug information are provided for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Installation instructions for Windows

Download the Windows archive minion-x.y.z-windows.tar.gz and unpack, you should find Minion executable minion.exe. The executable should work from the Windows command shell cmd.exe.

Installation instructions for Mac

Download the Mac archive minion-x.y.z-mac.tar.gz and unpack.

Installation instructions for Linux

Download the Linux archive minion-x.y.z-linux.tar.gz and unpack.

Compilation instructions

If there is no executable which works on your computer, you can use the source package (named minion-x.y.z-source.tar.gz).

Minion requires a reasonably up-to-date C++ compiler, and Python. Python is only used during the building process.

To compile, create a new directory for the build, and issue the following commands:

<path/to/source>/configure.py
make

where <path/to/minion> is the path to the Minion distribution (the directory which contains configure.py).

The configure.py script takes a variety of options, which are listed with --help. We give the most important ones here:

--quick: Make the compiling faster, at the cost of a slower executable
--debug: Enable many debugging related options (this will make Minion much slower, but adds many extra internal checks)
--compiler: Set the name of the compiler to use (this should be the name of the executable)

Once the minion executable is created, you can copy it anywhere you like.

On all platforms, Minion needs to be run from a command shell so that the output can be seen. If you go to the Minion directory in a shell and run the executable, it should output version information and a help message.