Installing and Testing the STK

The first step is to go to the STK home page, navigate to the download page, and download the latest ``source distribution'' (stk-4.2.1.tar.gz as of this writing, but any later 4.2.x release should be fine as well). Unpack this file wherever you want it, such as ~/stk/:

$ cd ~
$ mkdir stk
$ cd stk
$ # (download or copy stk-4.2.1.tar.gz to current directory)
$ gunzip stk-4.2.1.tar.gz 
$ tar -xf stk-4.2.1.tar 
$ ln -s stk-4.2.1 stk

The gunzip command uncompresses the tar file (which was compressed by gzip). The tar command unpacks the tar file into the directory stk-4.2.1 in the current working directory (assumed to be ~/stk/ here and below).^A.1 Finally, the ``stk'' symbolic link saves typing and enables release-independent access from scripts and such.

After downloading and unpacking the STK as described above, one might read the file ~/stk/stk/README to get oriented a bit.