Installation on Windows

A native, light-weight solution for running AUTO on Windows is to use GFortran, MSYS (see http://www.mingw.org), combined with a native Win32 version of Python, obtained at http://www.python.org. To install this setup:

• Install Python from http://www.python.org.
• Install the minimal Unix-like environment MSYS from http://www.mingw.org. You do not need to install MinGW itself.
• Install GFortran from http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortran.
• Open a CMD.EXE window (click Start, Run, type cmd in the input box and press the Enter key), and run sh in the MSYS directory, for instance, using c:\msys\1.0\ bin\sh $--$login $-$i (the Python CLUI does not work in the default MSYS shell environment accessed by its desktop icon).
• The sh command put you in a home directory, where you can unpack AUTO using gunzip and tar, as described above.
• Make sure that the gfortran and python binaries are in your PATH, and that their directories are at the front of it. You can do this, for instance, using the shell command export PATH="/c/Python24:/c/Program Files/gfortran/bin:$PATH" . You can also inspect, edit and then source the file auto/07p/cmds/auto.env.sh to achieve this.
• Now you should be able to run configure, make, and run AUTO as shown above.

Alternatively, AUTO runs on Windows as above using the Unix-like environment Cygwin (see http://www.cygwin.com). You should have at least the default installation, gcc, gfortran, make, and python installed. The 2D-plot command is not as reponsive in Cygwin Python as in the above native setup, however.

In both cases, an X server is not necessary, unless you wish to try to run PLAUT, PLAUT04, or the GUI.