Mosaic is available at ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic. Both source code and binaries (for Sun, SGI, IBM RS/6000, and DECstation Ultrix) are available. DEC Alpha binaries are now being distributed also. (You do not have to have Motif installed on your system to run Mosaic if you pick up a precompiled binary. You do, however, need Motif 1.1 to compile Mosaic.)
Before you start Mosaic, make sure xv, ghostview, and other auxiliary programs are installed on your system. The easiest way to check is with the which command:
% which xv xv is /local/apps/X11/bin/xvIf xv is not installed (or not in your path) which will print something like ``xv not found.'' The other programs Mosaic uses to display images are ghostview (to display Postscript files), xdvi (for LaTeX output), and
mpeg_play for
MPEG format movies. To see the complete list of these external
programs, refer to the mosaic on-line documentation under the
subject of ``X resources.''
If one of the auxiliary programs is not available on your system, but you do have an alternative program that does the same thing, you can change your .Xdefaults (X window resource database) file so Mosaic will use the other program. For example, Silicon Graphics workstations have a program named ipaste for viewing images in a format known as RGB. If you want to use ipaste instead of xv you can add a line to .Xdefaults. Refer to the on-line documentation for instructions.
If you cannot install some or all of the auxiliary programs you can still run Mosaic, but you will not be able to view all the information in every document. You will be limited to reading only text files and viewing in-lined images, but Mosaic can still be a valuable tool for finding information over the Internet.
To start Mosaic, just type ``xmosaic'' in a shell window. You will see a top level window displaying the initial startup document, which is known as the home page. The default home page from NCSA is described in the next section.
As Mosaic runs it needs to build temporary files. Some of these can be fairly large. By default Mosaic will build them in /tmp (a Unix directory that every user has access to). If there is not enough space in /tmp, Mosaic will not be able to display some images. One indication that you don't have enough space is that you will see the NCSA logo instead of a bitmap image in documents. The Mosaic Demo Document has several such bitmaps; if you see the NCSA logo instead of images in this document then you probably don't have enough free disk space in /tmp.
To fix this problem you can specify a different directory for Mosaic to use for its temporary files. One method is to specify the directory when you start Mosaic:
% xmosaic -tmpdir /home/users/fred/tmp