iSpin Installation

So I have recently taken on an automata course and we are using SPIN.


So I am just documenting the process and whatever. :P

Platform:
I am using an ASUS VivoBook Pro on Windows 10

I installed cgywin, it was relatively painless, which is awesome! :)


Then I installed Active state's version of Tcl/Tk wish which is for iSpin (cos I really really suck)


I installed Spin for PC the following way:
1)  I used the instructions here  specifically this was useful "download the latest pc_spin*.zip file"
2)  I downloaded pc_spin*.zip and extracted the contents lets call this folder of stuff pcSpinFolder
3)  I created a folder in cygwin /bin/ispin  - somewhere in my various searchings on google something rold me to do this so I did (it did not quite help, but it seemed to be a clean way to put files so there!)
4) NOTE: I copied all the stuff in pcSpinFolder into /bin/ispin
5) As an aside how you let cygwin access your windoes stuff is you copy it into the folder where you installed cygwin, this will appear as its root folder i.e. /   (I know this is obvious for seasoned users, but for a n00b like me, I had to do quite a bit of trial and error since I haven't touched linux in a while)
6) From 5 you can achieve 4 (hopefully... if you are a complete n00b, in cygwin run cd to the pcSpinFolder and type cp * /bin/ispin
7) Once you have cluttered /bin/ispin :P  you can then run  wish -f ispin.tcl, this should invoke the iSpin UI


And this popped up:
(I opened leader.pml from the UI)

Hope this helps!


Date: 20181001 00:26




To Update to the latest version of Spin in iSpin you can do this:

1) Download latest version of Spin for your platform, for me it is : here and I picked the Wwindows 64-bit executable
2) Unzip and copy out the spin*.exe file, rename to spin.exe
3) replace the spin.exe file in /bin/spin with this spiffy new spin.exe!

When you start up iSpin, again you should now see the latest version of Spin in the command line dialogue.

 Date: 20181001 00:40



At some point I realised I need to install gcc on cygwin =-=

So you just need to run the installer for cygwin again, but careful! Select the category "Developer"
and select gcc, the installer will handle the rest.


At which point when I run it says spin is not an external internal command or batch or blah... the thing to note is this is a windows error message... meaning it is the ispin calling the spin through windows. So you need to add the path where spin is found into %PATH% again if you have been messing wih windows since win95 or earlier this is old school n00b errors.... which I am commiting heh.

So put it in the path.

And later to see the diagram for the states I need dot..... so I installed dot and put it in the %PATH% and now... the UI seems to be behaving.... :)

This was about 4 am in the morning... darn.

Date: 20181001 11:21