Installation Guide

For this tutorial, I'm going to assume you have a Linux setup with the X Window system installed and running with a graphical desktop environment. If not, then on Debian-based distributions the terminal commands are:

For the X Window system:
sudo apt-get install xorg

For the MATE desktop environment (core):
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment-core

Then start X:
startx

Prerequisites

Screenshot of the MATE terminal

If you are using MATE, then you can get all the prerequisites with:
sudo apt-get install pluma gcc make unzip

This installs:

Pluma:

Text editor

GCC:

GNU Compiler Collection (C compiler)

Make:

For building and installing/uninstalling

Unzip:

For extracting ZIP archives

For other text editors a rather good list can be found here.

Compiling From Source

Screenshot of the MATE terminal

If you have downloaded the ZIP file of Project [SONICO] Version 1.0.0, and it is in your Downloads folder, the terminal commands to extract the ZIP archive are:

cd Downloads
unzip leung-engineering-sonico-v-1-0-0.zip

This will extract the project root directory into your Downloads folder.

If you have the CD, then you can just copy the project folder on the CD to your home folder.

Project [SONICO] document settings are of a "set and forget" type. For a given project and computer setup, most of the time you will be using the same settings (probably). When inspiration hits, you don't want to be fiddling around with settings, you just want to draw!

In src/include/x_window.h, you can set the top-level window size; WINDOW_WIDTH specifies the top-level window width and WINDOW_HEIGHT specifies the top-level window height. 1920 pixels is recommended for the width if your monitor resolution is 1920 pixels wide, and the height can be set to a suitable value.

You can also set the offset of the drawing from the top left in pixels (OFFSET_X and OFFSET_Y). The properties panel can be moved with PROPERTIES_X and PROPERTIES_Y for the offset from the top left in pixels. DRAWING_WIDTH and DRAWING_HEIGHT specifies the drawing width and height respectively. It is recommended to keep the defines in this paragraph as their default unless you have a reason to do so, like changing the drawing ratio from 16:9 to 16:10 or using all the space on a high-resolution monitor.

EXPORT_WIDTH and EXPORT_HEIGHT specifies the size of the exported BMP image in pixels. Recommended values are 1664 x 936 (W x H), 1920 x 1080 (W x H) and 1280 x 720 (W x H). This define is probably mostly user preference as 1920 x 1080 is higher resolution but larger file size. If you change this then you can also change the ratio of the drawing to suit the export, such as a less irrational number for the ratio. The resampling algorithm used for resizing is a work in progress. For now it's best to export to the drawing size (1664 x 936 (W x H), which is the default setting) and process it later in a program such as The GIMP.

In src/include/global.h you can also change the default drawing settings of the documents you create, such as the pen_size, pen_type, current_layer etc. These current settings can be changed once the document is created, as explained in the Mode Select and Layers tutorials.

When you are happy with the settings it is simply a case of:

cd where/project/sonico/root/directory/is
make
./build/sonico

If you are feeling dangerous, you can copy sonico to your /usr/bin directory:
sudo make install

Or if you don't trust makefiles:
sudo cp build/sonico /usr/bin

To check that it has been installed:
sonico