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Building Zinc NPRuntime

Background

A rewrite of zinc is underway which will see it replaced with a plugin which should work on a range of browsers (eg firefox, opera, safari, google chrome) and a range of operating systems. This will also move it more in line with current best practices for plugin development.

Subversion Source

The latest Zinc source can be checked out of a subversion repository branch:

cd $CMISS_ROOT
svn co https://svn.physiomeproject.org/svn/cmiss/zinc/branches/zinc-npruntime zinc-npruntime

First Build

The build process is identical for that of Zinc. See the page on Building Zinc

Install and setup

To install, open firefox and then choose file>open and then select the zinc.xpi file. It should be in $CMISS_ROOT/zinc-npruntime/install/zinc.xpi

The current zinc-npruntime is still only a proof of concept and so has not been tidied up much and lacks some infrastructure. The current version of zinc was used as a starting point and there is now a lot of code that is not used which hasn't been stripped out yet. The zinc preparer has not been replaced yet, so some of the library loading doesn't work. On ubuntu I had to configure my environment so that it could find the cmgui shared object library required to run zinc. I did this by adding the following line to my .bashrc:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$CMISS_ROOT/cmgui/lib/i686-linux/cmgui-gtk-debug

Note that this will find the debug version of the shared object library. Change the path to pick up the optimised version.

Once this was done I could open up the install page to check that the plugin did something:

chrome://zinc/content/zincInstallPage.html