MMIX IDE Installation

Ernie the IT administrator for the University of Northern Virginia’s computer science department was well aware that students require IDEs for school assignments. A new professor from Stanford had recently joined the faculty to teach a course on advanced algorithm design and analysis. Having worked closely with Prof. Knuth at Stanford, the new professor could see the value in MMIX as a teaching tool but thought the command line version supplied by Knuth would be hard to use for his new, window-based students. However, he knew of a new MMIX IDEcreated by a group of talented masters students at UMass and had requested that Ernie install it on all lab systems both Windows and UNIX.

Ernie easily found the install files for the MMIX Plugin on both sourceforge and the webpage created by its developers. Only a single jar file needed to be downloaded for both UNIX and Windows which could be used with any Java 1.4.2 or later JRE. Seeing as his lab machines already had this installed, Ernie downloaded the jar to a shared location and proceeded to follow the instructions on the web. Ernie knew that he could unjar the file he downloaded to get a readme file but seeing as this contained the same information as the website, he felt this was unnecessary. Ernie placed the jar file in a shared location, executed the startup command as documented, and the IDE started up without issue. Users are then prompted to supply a default storage location for new files and once set can proceed without issue.