FSL Installation

Introduction

These instructions were designed for FSL 3.x. With the introduction of FSL 4.x it is recommended that you run FSL using the VMware player. A full set of instructions are avaiable here.

These instructions are for installing FSL on a Windows XP computer. These instructions are a simplified version from the FSL web pages. Before beginning, you should have 

• A Windows XP laptop with 1Gb of RAM and at least 6 Gb free on the hard disk and a DVD drive.
• The Cygwin installer DVD from December 2005. (If you do not have this DVD, you can make one).
• A CD with fsl-3.3.7-cygwin.tar.gz (or newer) on it. You can get this online here.

We will first install Cygwin and then install FSL. Cygwin is (normally) extremely easy to install:

• Place the Cygwin DVD into your computer. Open it and then click on the black+green Setup icon to start the Cygwin setup.
• Press "Next" then "Install from Local Directory". Accept the various following questions until it brings up the "Select Packages" list.
• This next step is crucial. Once the list of packages appears, next to "All" there is the word "Default". Click once on the word "Default" and wait....it may take several minutes to change all the "Default" settings to "Install". This then means that you get all packages, and not just the default ones. 
  
• Then press "Next" twice and wait whilst all of Cygwin installs....this may take an hour or more.

• Assuming that you have downloaded the FSL distribution file onto your desktop, use a Windows file browser to move this file into C:\cygwin\usr\local
• In the Cygwin terminal:
  • cd /usr/local
  • tar xvfz fsl-*.tar.gz (don't use WinZip to do this unpacking - it can corrupt the files!)
  • echo 'export FSLDIR=/usr/local/fsl; . ${FSLDIR}/etc/fslconf/fsl.sh; export PATH=${FSLDIR}/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
  (make sure you type that EXACTLY including the "." and the spacing!!)
• Now close the terminal. Again using a Windows file browser, move file C:\cygwin\usr\local\fsl\FSL.lnk onto your Desktop - this should give you a new icon which starts the FSL GUI.
• If you have not installed Cygwin in C:/cygwin then you need to edit /usr/local/fsl/tcl/fslstart.tcl and change the relevant line near the end of the file to tell FSL exactly where Cygwin is installed. Note that the exact capitalisation of the word "cygwin" is important, and the slash must be a forward slash (/).