Installation

Nipper installation differs widely depending on the platform and whether you want to compile Nipper from source. Nipper was designed to be platform independent and has been tested on Linux, Windows and Mac OS-X. Additionally, Nipper has been reported to work on Cygwin and BSD. There is no reason why it would not work on other platforms too.

This page details the requirements and procedure for building Nipper from the source code and the installation of the official Windows binaries.

Source Compilation Requirements

Nipper has only a single requiement if you want to compile the source code yourself. The GNU C Compiler (MinGW can be used under Windows).

Compiling From Source

The Easy Way

If you have GNU make, then you can make use of the Makefile provided with Nipper. The procedure is as follows:

  1. Download the latest Nipper source code.
  2. Extract the source code.
  3. Change directory to the source code directory.
  4. Run make
  5. On Windows platforms, goto the Windows Binary Installation section for further information.
  6. As a privileged user, run make install

The Other Way

  1. Download the latest Nipper source code.
  2. Extract the source code.
  3. Change directory to the source code directory.
  4. Run gcc -o nipper nipper.c
  5. On Windows platforms, goto the Windows Binary Installation section for further information. For other platforms, the following steps require a privileged user.
  6. Copy nipper to its destination directory (/usr/bin is the recommended on UNIX / Linux systems).
  7. Copy nipper.conf to its destination directory (/etc is recommended on UNIX / Linux systems).
  8. On UNIX / Linux systems, copy the manual pages (found in the man directory) to the manual page location.

Windows Binary Installation

The official Nipper Windows binaries represent the Nipper source code compiled using MinGW and packaged into a zip file, together with some documentation. The files can be manually copied to any directory and run from there. Nipper will, by default, look for nipper.ini in the current directory, but will work fine if it cannot be located.