Installing Kahina for SWI-Prolog

On this page, you find step-by-step instructions for downloading and installing Kahina for SWI-Prolog.

Prerequisites

Java

Kahina requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE, version 6 or higher) to run. If a JRE is not yet installed on your computer, then use your operating system's package manager or a downloadable installer (e.g. ​from Oracle) to install one.

SWI-Prolog and JPL

You need a working installation of ​SWI-Prolog, including the ​JPL package (a Prolog-Java interface). To get it, ​download the installer or source archive appropriate for your system. If you are on Windows, just run the installer. If your system is Unix-like (most commonly, Linux or Mac OS X), then building from source is the recommended way of installing SWI-Prolog. Both ways of installing should also install the JPL package by default. An alternative way is to use a software package, which may or may not work. In particular, Ubuntu 10.04's swi-prolog-jpl package is known to ​be broken, which will prevent Kahina for SWI-Prolog from running.

Some black magic may be required in order for JPL to find the shared objects libjava.so and libjvm.so. In a typical installation, this amounts to adding the following line to your $HOME/.bashrc (adapt the paths to match your setup):

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/swipl-5.10.5/lib/i686-linux:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/client:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Obtaining Kahina

You have two options: either download the current binary release, or check-out and compile the latest code.

Either: Download the current binary release

Go to the downloads page and grab the latest release. It is in the form of a zip archive which will unpack to a directory called kahina. You can put it wherever you want - the directory $HOME/opt is a good choice on Unix-like operatings systems, and for Windows, we recommend C:\Program Files. We will henceforth refer to it as the kahina directory, or kahina for short.

Or: Check-out and compile the latest code

These instructions presuppose you have ​Subversion, ​Apache Ant and a ​Java Development Kit (JDK, version 6 or higher) installed.

Obtain Kahina by checking it out from our Subversion repository, e.g. using the following command from a convenient directory:

svn checkout https://github.com/texttheater/kahina kahina

This will checkout Kahina into a new directory called kahina. We will henceforth refer to it as the kahina directory, or kahina for short. cd into this directory, then run the following command to build Kahina:

ant

Setting up Kahina for SWI-Prolog

Finally, make sure your ​CLASSPATH contains the bin directory inside the kahina directory, as well as jedit-textArea.jar in the lib directory, before running SWI-Prolog.

Using Kahina for SWI-Prolog

Get started by having a look at the First Steps.