## 1.2 Installing from source

After obtaining and installing the previously outlined requirements, a tar ball of `NanoCap` can be downloaded from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nanocap/files/src/

As an alternative, the latest release can be checked out from the `mercurial` repository:

    bash-3.2$ hg clone http://hg.code.sf.net/p/nanocap/code-0 nanocap-code-0

After downloading and unpacking (if required), installation proceeds in the typically python fashion:

    bash-3.2$ python setup.py install

The installation runs a configure script (generated by `autoconf`) that detects available C and Fortran compilers and builds the associated shared libraries. To test for a successful installation, simply attempt to import `NanoCap` in a python terminal.

    bash-3.2$ python
    Python 2.7.3 (default, Jul 19 2012, 13:57:53)
    [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple Clang 3.1 (tags/Apple/clang-318.0.61)] on darwin
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> import nanocap
    >>> print nanocap.__version__
    1.0b9

The successful import and printing of the version number indicates the libraries installed correctly. To test the installation further, try running the example scripts shown in Section 10.

If the GUI and rendering libraries have been successfully installed then `NanoCap`can be ran either as an application or as libraries. To run the GUI enabled `NanoCap` simply type:

    bash-3.2$ nanocap

into the command prompt.