The following menu items are concerned with installation issues:

• Install: installing the currently running copy of SIARD Suite,
• Uninstall: uninstalling the currently installed copy of SIARD Suite.

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What Does Installation Mean?

SIARD Suite can be deployed on any platform which satisfies the aforementioned prerequisites. Therefore, installation is not implemented by a separate platform-specific installation program (e.g. setup.exe) but inside the SIARD Suite itself.

In fact installation really means the copying of the program files e.g. from a removable medium or another temporary location to some fixed location (network or fixed disk) and the saving of some properties in the user's personal "home" directory which contains the state based on past executions (e.g. C:\Users\<User>\.java\siard_suite-2.2.properties).

Thus it is possible to run SIARD Suite without "installing" it. It will then just be executed directly from the temporary location without changing another installed version linked to the personal state properties.

In particular a new version can be executed alongside an old version that is already installed.

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Install

The menu item Tools/Install permits installation of a new version of SIARD Suite and removes a previously installed version if there is one.

The menu item Tools/Install will be disabled if the version number of the currently running instance of SIARD Suite is less or equal to the version of the installed instance.

Otherwise executing Tools/Install will

• copy the files of the currently running instance to a folder to be chosen by the user,
• create a personal state properties file, containing the version and location of the installed instance, and
• attempt to create a shortcut for running SIARD Suite on the desktop. This will not always work on all operating systems, because LINUX distributions use a wide variety of ever-changing desktops.

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Uninstall

The menu item Tools/Unistall removes a previously installed version of SIARD Suite if there is one.

The menu item Tools/Uninstall will be disabled, if no personal state properties file can be found.

Otherwise executing Tools/Uninstall will remove

• desktop shortcut for running SIARD Suite, if one can be found,
• the folder with the program files unless the currently running instance is the installed instance. This folder must then be removed manually, and
• the personal state properties file, if its removal was requested.

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SIARD state properties

SIARD Suite reads and writes its state properties from a file siard_suite_2.2.properties which is located in the folder .java in the user's home directory.

The user's home directory is identified as the JAVA system property user.home. Unless it is redirected manually using a JVM -D argument, this system property has the same value as the environment variable %USERPROFILE% on Windows platforms or the environment variable $HOME (synonymous with "~") on LINUX/UNIX platforms.

The personal properties file is therefore usually

• C:\Users\<User>\.java\siard_suite_2.2.properties on Windows,
• /home/<User>/.java/siard_suite_2.2.properties on most LINUX distributions.