Tisean goes Win32

The TISEAN package has been written originally on and for UNIX systems. Nevertheless, we are aware that many potential users are using other platforms for their work. Thus, for a start, we have made some effort to provide a version of TISEAN to be used under Windows operating systems.

Previous releases had executables compiled under the DJGPP environment. The drawback was that it was not really a win32 system.

Starting from Release 2.0 we do no longer support these versions. Instead we changed to the cygwin system. This is (as far as we can say) win32. Especially, it supports long file names. Thus, both the program names and the file names of the input and output files can be named the same as under Unix/Linux. This has, in our opinion, the advantage that the names of the programs and the main pages are the same. For us it has the advantage that the compilation is much easier and there were no changes to the sources necessary at all. Therefore, there should be no additional error sources present in this part of the package.

To run the programs you need a file called cygwin.dll which is part of the archive. It has to be in the same directory as the binaries or in the main windows directory, of course. As old Unix fans we prefer to leave the system directories untouched, so we suggest to leave it together with the binaries. But we also know that the philosophy in the Win community might be different

The only drawback of this new system I can see is that the archive is quite big now. So some of you might have problems to download it. By now I have no idea how to overcome this problem. Nevertheless, after expanding the archive you will have quite a number of individual executables each of which is of manageable size.

If you are already using the cygwin environment you do not need the binaries. You can easily compile the sources using the configure and the make facilities.

To install the binaries and run the programs proceed in the following way:

At this point we want to thank Jürgen Kahrs, who drew our attention on the Cygwin project. It really helped a lot.


® Rainer Hegger, Holger Kantz, and Thomas Schreiber