Installing Golem

Prerequisites

Golem requires you to be using at least Python 2.4 (run python -V at the shell to check what version you have installed), although we recommend Python 2.5. It was primarily developed on Mac OS X, but has been successfully run on both Linux and Windows as well.

You can download Golem packages from http://code.google.com/p/pygolem/.

Installation

There are two ways to install Golem:

Installing Golem by hand (on Unix / Mac OS X)

Untar the Golem tarball you’ve downloaded (tar xvzf golem.tar.gz), and change into the directory that’s created.

Once again, you have two options. To install using setup.py, which is recommended, run python ./setup.py install (if necessary, as root) from the root of the Golem distribution directory. This will, as above, download the libraries Golem depends on and install them for you if you don’t have them already.

Alternatively, if you’re just going to use the tools distributed with Golem, particularly summon, run make && sudo make install to install those tools and the libraries they depend on. However, if you want to program using the Golem library, or you’re a more experienced Python user, you should use setup.py, as using the Makefile approach does not install the Golem library into the standard location for user-installed Python libraries.

Installing Golem by hand on Windows

If you prefer to install from source, download golem.zip from the download area and run setup.py install as in the Unix instructions.

If you prefer to use a Windows installer, first install lxml and simplejson (instructions can be found on their websites, above) and then install golem-1.0.win32.exe, which can be obtained from the download area at http://code.google.com/p/pygolem/ .

More information for Windows users

Scripts such as summon will be installed into a subdirectory Scripts of the directory where your Python install is, typically C:\Python25\. To run Summon in that case, type C:\Python25\Python.exe C:\Python25\Scripts\summon. Dictionaries are installed into C:\Python25\site-packages\golem-[version]-py[version].egg\dictionaries\; e.g. C:\Python25\site-packages\golem-1.0-py2.5.egg\dictionaries\.