Note: This file describes the installation of source release of BKchem. If you have
      downloaded the binary release, please read the INSTALL.binary file instead.



Installation of BKchem is very simple. But before you can run the program you
must install the following:

1/ Python.
   On www.python.org get a distribution of Python for your platform. Note that
   BKchem will run only on Python 2.3 or newer.
2/ pycairo
   This library is optional and is available only for Linux. It enables high quality
   export to PDF and PNG formats with support for antialiased unicode texts.
   It requires the cairo library. Both can be found on http://cairographics.org/snapshots/.
   The current and tested version is 0.5.1.



--- Single directory deployment ---

No installation is needed to run BKchem. This means that you can run the program
directly after unpacking the downloaded sources.
Simply run the bkchem.py located in the 'bkchem-X.Y.Z/bkchem' directory, where X,Y,Z
are version numbers of BKchem release.


example:
on Unix do
>cd "the dir where you have downloaded the BKchem package"
>tar -xzf bkchem-X.X.X.tgz -C "the dir where you want to unpack BKchem"
>cd "the dir where you have unpacked BKchem"/bkchem-X.Y.Z/bkchem
>python bkchem.py



--- System-wide install ---

Under Linux and other Unix systems you have the possibility to use a 'classic'
way of installing software. Major advantage of doing this is that it you will have
a "bkchem" program in your path, thus easily startable from any path.
For the purpose of installation BKchem uses a standard for installation of
python modules - distutils. The installation is accomplished by simply running
the setup.py script from the bkchem directory with 'install' argument:

>python setup.py install

NOTE: usually you have to be root in order to be able to perform the install! 

This way all python sources will be installed in a standard directory for
third-party modules - usually something like '/usr/lib/python/site-packages'.
The templates, pixmaps and other such stuff will go into 'prefix/share/bkchem',
where prefix is usually 'usr' or 'usr/local'.
Documentation will be put in 'prefix/share/doc/bkchem'.
Finally a sh-script 'prefix/bin/bkchem' will be created so that you can run
bkchem from anywhere you want.

To influence the paths that are used during install - especially the 'prefix'
run:

>python setup.py install --help

to see the available options.

Running 

>python setup.py --help 

will give you another set of options available for the install.


Any comments or reports on installation process are especially welcome as this
is very hard to test thoroughly on a single machine.