-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 3
Downloading, Installing, and Running Alice
You can download Alice from the Alice website here. You can also view and download builds here on gitHub from the releases.
Alice 2.x does not require "installation" in the same way that many other software applications do. All we really need is a place on the machine's hard drive to copy files. As a result, the installation of Alice 2.x should succeed on machines where others would fail.
However, one should have Administrator permissions when Alice is executed for the first time to allow the software to create all the required files/folders and preferences before the permission is set on the Alice folder.
To install, we followed (and recommend) these steps:
- Download the zipped file Alice2.x.zip to the desktop.
- Unzip on the desktop. The Windows download is a .zip file. Later versions of Windows and / or browsers will now open and display the contents of a .zip file without actually extracting the contents of the file. You must specifically click on the Extract button, which should create an Alice folder which you can move to any location on your computer and run the Alice application (Alice.exe).
- Move the unzipped folder (containing all of the Alice files) to the Program Files (X86) folder on the C:\ drive.
- Create a shortcut on the desktop for Alice.exe.
- Click the shortcut to start Alice. The first time you run Alice on Windows, hold down the Control key when clicking on the app. Select Run as Administrator. You will not have to hold the Control key after the first time you run Alice.
By way of explanation: Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 all have a strong malware protection scheme that resists installing non-standard software directly on the hard drive. The best way I have found to work within this protection scheme is to unzip the Alice download on the desktop and then move it to the hard drive.
- Double-click the disk image (.dmg) to mount the Alice volume.
- Open the Alice volume (it should open automatically) and drag the Alice app to the displayed application folder. If the file gets copied successfully, you can drag the Alice volume to the trash.
- Create a shortcut on the desktop for Alice.
- Click the shortcut to start Alice.The first time you run Alice on your Mac, hold down the Control key when clicking on the app. Select Run and then Continue. You will not have to hold the Control key after he first time you run Alice.
NOTE: On OS X 10.8.x (Mountain Lion), the default settings for the Finder hides the hard drives and external drives connected to your system. The Alice download opens a .dmg - disk image - file which is a virtual external drive. So it may appear that after the Alice download has completed, you may double-click on the file and it will seem that nothing has happened. If this is the case:
Click once on your desktop, so that you are in the Finder. Go to the Finder menu and select "Preferences" Look at the following image and make sure that you have the same settings…
Close the preferences window.
You should now see your hard drive, and the Alice .dmg icon (Looks like an external drive). If not, attempt to open the Alice download again.
Apple Silicon Mac (M1, M2) users have reported an issue where Alice 2 may fail to launch after install. The solution is to install another intel-based app (eg. Alice 3) as this install will prompt the user to install Rosetta 2 which is necessary to run older apps. You may also type the following in Terminal to install Rosetta 2:
/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta (root permission not required)
Be sure to install Java on your machine before trying to install Alice for Linux. Go to java.com/en/download/linux_manual.jsp?locale=en and download the appropriate Java version. For help on downloading and installing Java on your machine, click the “Instruction” link.
- Click on Download Alice 2.x for Linux for the appropriate gallery version of Alice 2.x.
- After the download is complete, unzip the downloaded file.
- Place the complete uncompressed directory in the desired location on your machine.
- Open the Alice 2.x directory
- Find the Required directory in the Alice 2.x directory and open it
- Double-click the run-alice file in the Required directory (you may wish to create a short-cut for this file to place on your desktop). If Alice does not start, you may need to reset the classpath for the Java location on your machine.
Alice 2.x compatibility problems with networked machines are almost always related to the Alice 2 preferences file location being hard-coded as:
C:\Documents and Settings<username>.alice
In cases where the user's home directory was not on the C drive or in a different path, Alice would display a gallery viewer error and possibly prevent the user from accessing Alice.
We have modified Alice 2.x to allow the user to enter in the path to a writable directory on any drive, networked or local. This can be done by
Locate and delete the .alice2 folder, located in the user's home directory (if it exists) from the current location on the machine because Alice will search in this directory first before redirecting items to the network location. Deleting this directory is not a problem as Alice will always recreate it the next time Alice starts.
Edit the following file in a text editor:
Alice 2.x\Required\etc\config.txt
In the config.txt file, you should see something that looks like this:
0,78,152
(Note: The numbers (0,78,152), set the background color in Alice. Contact us if you are interested in changing the background for better view or display when using a projector.)
Add a new line at the bottom and enter in the full path to where you would like the preferences stored. This will need to be a writable directory. Do not use quotes. For example, to change the location to the desktop on drive E, do the following:
0,78,152 E:\Documents and Settings<username>\Desktop\
Save the file and close it. If Alice is running, make sure to shut it down and restart. To confirm the entered path is working properly, navigate to the directory you typed above and you should see a .alice2 directory. If you do not see one, make sure hidden directories are viewable.