MST supported platforms
-----------------------
MST was originally developped for three platforms: Linux, IRIX and Windows. 
Due  to the lack of interest in the IRIX version, the support for IRIX has 
been dropped.   Due to problems with the RTI on Windows (which have since 
been solved) followed by the addition of threading support on Linux (which 
has not been ported to Windows), the Windows port has temporarily been dis-
continued. Support for Windows should come back soon.

In summary, MST currently runs on two major Linux flavors:
Suse Linux 9.0 with the gcc 3.4 compiler
Red Hat 9.0 with the gcc 3.2 compier

Porting to other Unix flavors should not be an issue, as long as you have an
RTI supported on the desired platform.


MST dependencies
----------------
The MST requires several packages. Besides the RTI for which the MSF team 
provides a license, other packages are required all available through Open-Source.

RTI (Run Time Infrastructure = HLA implementation). MST currently uses RTIng-1.3.

FLTK <http://www.fltk.org/>  (Fast Light ToolKit) is used for the MSF GUIs.

Xerces-C <http://xml.apache.org/xerces-c/>  is used for validating and parsing 
the XML robot description file.

ODE <http://www.ode.org/>  (Open Dynamic Engine) is the core dynamic engine used 
for the Mission Simulation Dynamic Engine (MSDE) component.

Note that all the required packages are installed on the ic-arc AFS filesystem. 
ThusConsequently, any person inside Ames, can directly use the pre-installed 
packages located at: /afs/ic-afs.arc.nasa.gov/msf/pkgs/


Installing MST
--------------
After obtaining a MST distribution there is a simple three steps procedure:

1) Edit the file scripts/locations.csh to reflect your current package distrubtion 
and MSF location.  

2)Configure your environement using the following command: 
source msfsource.csh
  
3) Build MST using make: 
make install
  
Note that make install will build the core MST and all the existing components, 
plus generate the documentation. Simply typing "make" without any argument will 
print a help message with the possible make targets.

By default MSF is configured to be built on multiple platforms from the same source 
tree.  For this reason, all the objects, libraries and binaries are created into 
platform dependent directories having the following form: ix86-linux-gcc3.3-glibc2.3.


MST build system
----------------
The multi-platform MST build system is described in the document "MSF Build System"
(see documentation <~MSF/documentation/build_system.pdf>.


Starting to use MST
-------------------
To come...