XCircuit for Windows XP (and maybe others?)

XCircuit-Cygwin compile and install:

Requirements: Windows, plenty of disk space. Nothing unusual. High bandwidth internet connection is definitely a plus.

Step 1: Install Cygwin

It is absolutely necessary that at least a base version of Cygwin be installed, as well as the prerequisited mentioned in the link above.

Step 2, Option 1: XCircuit Quick Install

This is the easiest way to get XCircuit running, but may be significantly out of date from the latest version, depending on when I last compiled XCircuit on a Windows machine.
  1. Download (use your browser and download to the root directory of the Cygwin distribution, which by default is C:\cygwin:
    File Revision Size Date
    xcircuit_3_9_39.tgz 3.9.39 (835KB) October 10, 2015
  2. Bring up a Cygwin terminal on the Windows desktop.
  3. Type cd /
  4. This is where the file xcircuit_3_9_39.tgz should be.
  5. Type tar xfz xcircuit_3_9_39.tgz
  6. Run by typing xcircuit. This should be all you need to do! In case the executable cannot be found, it may be necessary to type the full path name, which is /usr/local/bin/xcircuit.

Step 2, Option 2: XCircuit Compile and Install from Source

Since I don't update the Cygwin distribution very often, it can get rather outdated compared to the latest source distribution of xcircuit. However, if you follow the Cygwin installation instructions, you should have everything you need to compile xcircuit from source.
  1. I suggest creating a directory /usr/local/src with the command "mkdir /usr/local/src", then doing "cd /usr/local/src" before proceeding with the next item. However, the xcircuit source may be downloaded into the default top directory without any problem.
  2. Use your web browser to download the latest xcircuit source distribution. If default values are chosen during install, then the Cygwin top-level directory is rooted at "C:\cygwin", and the directory above is "C:\cygwin\usr\local\src" as viewed in the Windows environment.
  3. Download the latest .tgz file from the xcircuit web page.
  4. Once the .tgz file is in the proper destination, you should be able to see the file from the Cygwin terminal prompt by typing the command "ls".
  5. At the Cygwin terminal prompt, type "tar xfz xcircuit-3.9.39.tgz" (of course, substitute the filename for the actual version and revision number of the magic source).
  6. Type "cd xcircuit-3.9.39" (likewise, substitute the correct name).
  7. Type "./configure --without-cairo". I'm not aware of cairo (accelerated 2D) graphics libraries being available under Cygwin. If anybody ever finds that this has changed, please let me know. With cairo graphics, line rendering in xcircuit is antialiased, and text rendering is done by the font rendering engines. Without it, lines are simply rasterized and text is drawn by vectors. Not as beautiful, but it's the way xcircuit worked for many years and is perfectly serviceable.
  8. Follow up with "make". Hopefully this runs without errors (although there are a handful of warnings, these may be ignored).
  9. Final step is "make install".
  10. You can test by typing "xcircuit" at the Cygwin terminal prompt.
  11. Note that there is an executable of xcircuit called "/usr/local/bin/xcircexec.exe", and may be launched from a batch file, and thereby launched directly from the Windows desktop. This is left as an exercise unless someone wants to send me a working batch file.

Supplementary material

File Revision Size Date
examples.tgz 3.4.3 (40KB) October 19, 2005

Last updated: August 5, 2016 at 7:19pm