Installing on Linux

At the moment, our supported Linux distribution is Ubuntu. As a first step, you will need to install the base operating system. Installing Ubuntu is out of scope of this document, but you can find detailed instructions and the actual operating system images from www.ubuntu.com.

Once you have the base operating system installed, you need to download the software packages we distribute from the Download page. After you have downloaded the packages, you can install them by just double-clicking on the packages from your file browser. This launches debi - the graphical package installer. Start by installing the 3rd party software (dependencies) first. Once this is done, proceed by installing the actual Cornerstone software. Alternatively, you can also install the packages using the command line tool dpkg. The syntax for this would be:

sudo dpkg -i <package>

Required Packages

The run-time packages are named in the form: cornerstone_1.0.VERSION_ARCHITECTURE.deb, where VERSION is the release number, for example 2784. The architecture signifies the running architecture, either i686 for 32-bit Linux versions and amd64 for 64-bit Linux versions (both Intel and AMD). The run-time package includes the cornerstone libraries and applications as pre-compiled binaries.

The SDK packages are named in the form: CornerStone-SDK-1.0.VERSION-ARCHITECTURE.tgz. The package is a compressed tar archive that contains three debian packages:

  • run-time package: the same package as mentioned above
  • dev package: the relevant header files, and API documentation
  • src package: the source code for the various components and demo applications in MultiTouch

Whenever installing the packages you should check that the packages have identical version number. In general Ubuntu package installers will check this anyhow, so it is a bit difficult to install corrupt packages.

Setting Up

Once Cornerstone has been installed, you need to give permissions to access FireWire devices and USB peripherals to any users who plan to run Cornerstone software. This is done by adding the desired user into the video and dialout groups. If your user is called multi, then you would execute the following commands:

sudo adduser multi video
sudo adduser multi dialout

Where are things located?

By default, Cornerstone packages install all files under the /usr directory. For example, the binaries will be located under /usr/bin, libraries under /usr/lib and so forth. The system-wide configuration and data files can be found under /usr/share/MultiTouch.

The user-specific configuration files will be located in a directory .MultiTouch/ under the user's home directory. If your user is called multi, the directory with user-specific configuration files would be /home/multi/.MultiTouch/.

Running Demos

To run the demo applications that are shipped with Cornerstone, just type the name of the application you want to run in a terminal and press enter. To run Twinkle, you would type:

Twinkle

More details about the shipped software and parameters they take can be found in Demo Applications.

Other Linux distributions

The number of available Linux distributions is so large that we cannot directly support them all. People who wish to use CornerStone on other Linux distributions can try the alien to convert the Ubuntu/Debian packages for other platforms.