Swarm Installation Guide#

Here we describe the necessary steps for installing Swarm on your laptop or desktop computer. The instructions are Operating System (OS) dependent- Swarm will run on Windows, MAC and Linux.

Platform-independent instructions#

All Raspberry Shakes come with Swarm which made available for download to your laptop of desktop computer from the Raspberry Shake web front end. You can download the preconfigured Swarm application from http://rs.local/ >> Actions icon >> DOWNLOADS >> SWARM.

After downloading Swarm from your Raspberry Shake to your local laptop of desktop computer, please navigate to the folder where you saved Swarm. You will find SWARM.zip here.

Windows#

  1. You will need a program to open the SWARM.zip file. You can easily find one in here: http://www.7-zip.org/.

  2. Using your preferred program to open ZIP’ed files, unzip SWARM.zip and save the output to a new folder named “swarm”, for instance. The folder naming is typically done automatically. Pay attention to where the new folder is saved to.

  3. JAVA is required for running SWARM. To install java, please visit https://java.com/en/download/. Here you will find plenty of information and instructions for installing Java.

  4. Once you have successfully installed JAVA, navigate to the swarm folder and double click on the file named “swarm_console.bat”. Swarm should open right away.

MAC#

  1. In the folder where you downloaded SWARM.zip, double click on SWARM.zip. A new folder will be created called “swarm-2.5.9”, for example. The actual folder name depends on the version of Swarm available at the time you downloaded the program from your Raspberry Shake.

  2. JAVA is required for running SWARM. To install java, please visit http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html and download the lastest supported version.

  3. To install Java post download, double click on the downloaded java file and follow the instructions.

  4. Once you have installed java, type the cmd and space keys simultaneously and then enter “terminal” into the Spotlight search window.

  5. A new window will appear with a command-line prompt.

  6. Now type “javac -version” and then Enter. The current version of java should be printed to the terminal. We recommend version 1.8.0_131 or later:

    $ javac -version

  7. Now navigate to where you have Swarm installed and unzipped (e.g.):

    $ cd /Users/osop/swarm-2.6.3

And hit Enter.

  1. Open swarm with this command:

    $ ./swarm.sh

And hit Enter again, opening Swarm. Each time you would like to run swarm, you will need to similarly open a terminal, navigate to where Swarm lives on your system and execute the swarm.sh command.

Linux#

First, Navigate to where you downloaded SWARM.zip and decompress:

$ unzip SWARM.zip

A new folder will be created called “swarm-2.5.9”, for example. The actual folder name depends on the version of Swarm available at the time you downloaded the program from your Raspberry Shake.

Second, JAVA is required for running SWARM. To install java, please check your Linux distribution and go to https://java.com/en/download/help/linux_x64_install.xml there you can find plenty of information of installing process. For Ubuntu 16.04, for example, you can satisfy the JAVA dependency with:

$ sudo apt install openjdk-8-jre

You can confirm JAVA was successfully installed with:

$ java -version

Finally, now you can open and run swarm with this command:

$ cd <path_to_swarm_folder_here>
$ sh swarm.sh

More details/ resources#

For more details on how to use swarm see: