Merge pull request #1867 from tklein23/develop

Added first draft of "quickstart" instructions to documentation.

doc/md/QUICKSTART.md

@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
+# SHOGUN-TOOLBOX Quickstart
+
+This quickstart assumes that you have access to standard unix/linux tools,
+cmake and a C/C++ compiler.  It may be neccessary to install additional
+libraries or header files to compile shogun or its interfaces.
+
+## Build prerequisites
+
+* Minimal requirements: standard utils like cmake, gcc/g++/clang, ldd,
+  wget/curl, tar/bzip2, bash, grep, test, sed, cut, awk, ldd, uname, cat,
+  python-2.7
+* Optional libraries to improve performance: lapack3-dev, atlas3-headers,
+  atlas3-base-dev, libeigen3-dev
+* Depending on the enabled interfaces you may need: swig 2, r-base-dev, 
+  liboctave-dev, openjdk-6-jdk/openjdk-7-jdk, jblas, jblas-dev,
+  python2.7-dev, python-numpy
+
+## Download sources
+
+The following commands will get the prepared shogun source archives.  Note
+that some examples might depend on "shogun-data", which is approximately
+250 MB of data to be downloaded.  The additional data is not required for
+shogun itself, so you may skip downloading them.
+
+```
+
+$ cd "$HOME"
+$ wget ftp://shogun-toolbox.org/shogun/releases/3.1/sources/shogun-3.1.1.tar.bz2
+$ tar xjf shogun-3.1.1.tar.bz2
+
+$ wget ftp://shogun-toolbox.org/shogun/data/shogun-data-0.7.tar.bz2
+$ tar xjf shogun-data-0.7.tar.bz2
+
+$ cd shogun-3.1.1
+$ rm -rv data/
+$ ln -s ../shogun-data-0.7 data
+```
+
+## Compile and install SHOGUN-TOOLBOX into home directory
+
+We assume that you want to install shogun in a subdirectory `shogun-install` of
+your user home.  Installing shogun to system-directories is possible as well,
+but may require root/sudo privileges.
+
+```
+
+$ cd "$HOME/shogun-3.1.1"
+
+$ mkdir build
+$ cd build
+$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$HOME/shogun-install" ..
+
+$ make -j5 all
+$ make install
+```
+
+## Run the examples
+
+Many toy examples on can be found within `share/shogun/examples/libshogun`.
+In order to run them, you need to point `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` to the location
+of the compiled library.  If everything from above was successful, this
+should work well:
+
+```
+
+$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/shogun-install/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
+$ cd "$HOME/shogun-install/share/shogun/examples/libshogun"
+$ chmod +x ./so_multiclass_BMRM && ./so_multiclass_BMRM
+```
+
+# You know what you're doing?
+
+A small cheat sheet of available cmake options.  This list does not
+claim to be comprehensive -- it's meant to be a quick reference for
+those you know what they do.
+
+## Enabling modular interfaces
+* `-DPythonModular=ON`, `-DOctaveModular=ON`, `-DJavaModular=ON`,
+* `-DPerlModular=ON`, `-DRubyModular=ON`, `-DCSharpModular=ON`,
+* `-DRModular=ON`, `-DLuaModular=ON`
+
+## Enabling static interfaces (legacy)
+* `-DCmdLineStatic=ON`, `-DPythonStatic=ON`, `-DOctaveStatic=ON`
+* `-DMatlabStatic=ON`, `-DRStatic=ON`
+
+## Handy cmake options
+* `-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug` or `-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release`
+* `-DENABLE_TESTING=ON` or `-DENABLE_TESTING=OFF`
+* `-DCMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH=...`, `-DCMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH=...`
+
+# Got stuck? Found a bug? Need help?
+
+* Bug tracker: https://github.com/shogun-toolbox/shogun/issues
+* Chat: Join IRC channel #shogun at irc.freenode.net
+* Mailing list: Send an empty message to shogun-list-subscribe@shogun-toolbox.org