Right now (September 18, 2000) I've got Avail working on the Macintosh and (in theory) under Windows. Linux might also work, but you'll have to either (1) locate the virtual machine files for VisualWorks 3.0 Non-commercial by yourself, or (2) ask me to put them up on the site. I'll talk you through the installation under Linux -- more precisely I'll offer uninformed suggestions and take notes for the purpose of updating this page for future guinea pigs^H^H^H pilgrims.
If you download the windows version, please let me know if the files come through ok in terms of not converting linefeeds and carriage returns. Most of these files are quite sensitive about this.
You should now have (inside the Avail 0.4.0aa directory):
The Avail directory contains all Avail source (source code written in Avail syntax). Unlike the previous releases, this release of Avail does not include any C++ source code.
Download the VisualWorks virtual machine. For Mac, download VW30NcMac.sea.bin (450K). For Windows, download VW30NcPC.exe (560K). In each case this is a self-extracting archive, and should be executed to extract a small folder with one or two files in it. Move these into your Avail 0.4.0aa folder and you're ready to start.
If you want to try this on x86 Linux, email me and I'll send you the VM and work out a way to tar (but not feather) everything.
Start up Avail. On the Mac you just double-click the 0.4.0aa.im image file, or drag it over the virtual machine file ("vwnc30"). On the PC you can either drop the image on the virtual machine or set up a shortcut (to invoke "visual.exe" with "0.4.0aa.im" as an argument) or associate visual.exe with the ".im" extension and then double-click 0.4.0aa.im.
Choose "File -> Set VisualWorks Home" from the launcher's menu bar, and then enter the absolute path to your VisualWorks 3.0 NC installation.
There should already be an Avail browser open. If not (or if you accidentally close it), simply select the text "AvailBrowser open" in any text window and hit F2. Let me know what you think, in particular about the current installation process.
Documentation for Avail is here.
(This page was last updated April 5, 2001)