Download and installation instructions

Quick install: FView application on Windows

Kristin Branson (Janelia Farm Resarch Campus, HHMI) has kindly provided an installer for a Windows version of FView. This installs FView.exe, which can be used to record uncompressed .fmf movies. The FlyTrax plugin is also included, allowing realtime tracking of individual flies. This downloader was built with the latest libcamiface installer, and we recommend Pt. Grey cameras for this release. (Their inexpensive Firefly MV USB camera is a good way to get started.)

Full install information

Supported operating systems

Installation of applications built from Motmot components, such as the movie acquisition program fview or the FlyMovieFormat player playfmf, currently requires installation of several constituent modules. Due to this modular, multi-component nature of Motmot, use of a package manager facilitates easy installation.

Packages for the native package management system of Ubuntu Linux (release “Lucid Lynx”, version 10.04) are provided, making this is the the easiest way to get started and the best tested operating system. The provided Ubuntu packages manage these dependencies, allowing automatic installation and updates, while on other systems, these dependencies must be handled manually.

The components are also tested on Windows and Mac OS X. Source code, Windows binaries, and for libcamiface, Mac binaries, are provided. See above for a FView installer for Windows.

To summarize:

• Ubuntu Linux (10.04): best supported, native package management. See below.
• Windows 32 bit: binary packages provided for most components (see above for FView installer)
• Mac OS X: binary packages provided for libcamiface, build the rest from source
• Other operating systems: build from source

Download

libcamiface

Source and binaries packages of libcamiface can be downloaded from its release page.

Python modules

With the exception of libcamiface (above), Motmot is comprised of standard Python packages. These are distributed on the Python Package Index (a.k.a. PyPI).

Installation

See the libcamiface page for platform-specific installation instructions on libcamiface.

The rest of motmot should be installed with standard Python idioms. For example, if you want to install FView, you can use the following command:

easy_install motmot.fview

This will download and install FView and all its Python dependencies.

Ubuntu packages

I maintain an Ubuntu repository to enable myself and my collaborators to use these packages with minimal installation difficulties. Following these instructions is, by far, the easiest way to get started with motmot, especially if you’re not experienced with C and Python installation issues.

These instructions are for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Pre-built binaries are not provided for other distributions.

1. Start the Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal).

2. In the terminal window, type the following. This will add Andrew Straw’s repositories (the PPA is for purely open source software, and the debs.astraw.com site packages non-open software) to your list of repositories:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:astraw/ppa
sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/astraw.list http://debs.astraw.com/sources.list.d/astraw-$(lsb_release -cs).list

You will be prompted for your password – this is normal.

3. Accept Andrew Straw’s keyring. Still from in the terminal window, type:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install astraw-keyring && sudo apt-get update

After lots of downloading, you will eventually be asked to accept the astraw-keyring package even though it cannot be authenticated (“WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated! astraw-keyring Install these packages without verification [y/N]?”). This is normal; type “y” (for yes) to trust Andrew Straw to install software on your computer.

4. Start Synaptic (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager).

5. Install fview by clicking the “Search” button and typing “python-motmot-fview” in the Search field. Then click the “Search” button. After a couple seconds, this will bring up a list of packages matching your search string.

6. In the small empty square next to “python-motmot-fview”, click once and select “Mark for installation”. Click on the “Apply” button.

7. If you are using a firewire camera, add your user to the “video” group, and change the owner of the raw1394 device to this group. In the terminal window again, type:

sudo adduser $USER video
sudo chown .video /dev/raw1394

Once you did this, you will need to log out and log in again for the new group membership to take effect.

8. Start fview (Applications->Sound & Video->fview).

Download direct from the source code repository

See the Motmot development page for details on how to download the latest version control repository.