Hello, can anyone please help me I'm so excited to star programming in Fan but I am not able to use it. I don't know how to install/use it. I have read the documentation, and the help and faq'z but I don't understand :(

I'm really confused and feel lost. Please help!

Lots of thanks in advance.

P.S.

I am using Windows XP - and Yes, I do have the latest Java installed :)

Regards, Jason.

I have read all relative documentation on the site but I don't understand how to get it to install, or set it up on my computer so I can start using it. I have tried double-clicking on all the application files (*.exe) in the bin directory but the only thing that happens is I get an MSDOS window popup for a split second and then it closes again.

All the Fan tools are designed to be run in a console which you can usually find under the Start Menu under Accessories as "Command Prompt".

From there you can cd to the "{home}\bin" directory and try running one of the Fan programs like "fan.exe" or "fansh.exe".

Hope that helps.

Using Fan works much the same way as original Java development did, you edit your files in some general purpose editor and use the tools as brian mentions.

There's an alternative. Though still early days (no code completion or debugger yet), Thibaut Colar is working on an IDE which makes these things somewhat easier for new users: http://fanide.colar.net/install

/Casper

Thank you both for the help :)

I'm downloading the IDE now.

thanks again jason

I'm not sure if this helps, but I'm running WinXP with cygwin, and I unzipped fan-1.0.46.zip into ~/dev then added ~/dev/fan-1.0.46/bin to my $PATH.

I had to chmod 755 .exe in the bin directory and had to rename all the other bash script files to .old, like so:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:20 fan.exe*
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None    93 Jul  8 12:26 fan.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:10 fanb.exe*
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None    83 Jul 17 08:20 fanb.old
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None  2181 Jul  8 12:26 fanlaunch
-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:20 fanp.exe*
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None    88 Jul  8 12:26 fanp.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:20 fansh.exe*
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None    93 Jul  8 12:26 fansh.old
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None   333 Jul  8 12:26 fansubstitute
-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:20 fant.exe*
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None    81 Jul  8 12:26 fant.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:20 flux.exe*
-rw-r--r-- 1 glewis None    90 Jul  8 12:26 flux.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:20 jstub.exe*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 glewis None 98304 Jul 17 08:20 nstub.exe*

Then I could run "fan -version".

-- Glenn

One of the problems with zip files is that they don't retain executable permission bits and such like.

Yet tar.gz/bz2 isn't easily usable for Windows. I guess that's the conundrum of one zip for all.

Anyway, running fan under Cygwin didn't work if you made the shell scripts executable? Is there some anti-Windows stuff in there? And, of course, Cygwin isn't the common use case. But it might be nice to have easy support for it if it doesn't cause trouble for the more common platforms.

This is all just my own personal view of things.

If you are using Cygwin, then it's like you are on linux/Unix, so you should run this affter expanding the Fan distro to fix the permissions / execution flag:

cd fan
sh adm/unixsetup

On windows, the 7zip application is great, it's free and opensource unlike winzip and supports most formats (zip, tgz bz etc...) so I think tgz even on windows would be fine.

sh adm/unixsetup

Thanks for the tip. Maybe I should have paid better attention.

On windows, the 7zip application is great

I use 7-Zip on Windows, too, when I have the choice, but requiring it (or other such tools) is a barrier that might keep some folks away. Worth keeping in mind, at least.