FluidMath™ Installation Instructions
Last modified April 8, 2011
NOTE: you must be connected to the internet to install and activate FluidMath.
NOTE: if you are a system administrator, additional instructions are at the end of this document.
Please follow these steps to install FluidMath:
- Install Microsoft .NET 4 from this URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a391abd-25c1-4fc0-919f-b21f31ab88b7 - Download and run the FluidMath installer. You should have received a link to the installer via email when you purchased FluidMath. The installer will be named something like “FluidMathInstaller.exe” but may have additional version information in the filename such as “FluidMathInstaller-v1.0.8.exe”.
- The first time you run FluidMath, enter your activation code when prompted.
If you next see a new window appear with a graph-paper-like background then you have successfully installed FluidMath – Congratulations!! A “Getting started” video will begin playing and introduce the basic concepts of FluidMath. You can play this and other videos at any time by going to the “How do I..” menu item and selecting the appropriate topic.
If you are unable to get FluidMath installed, please contact Fluidity Software support at fluidmathsupport [at] fluiditysoftware.com .
Getting started and help resources
FluidMath includes multiple resources to help you get started using FluidMath:
- There is a help document available by clicking on “Help -> FluidMath Help”.
- Videos demonstrating various topics are available by clicking on “How do I..” and then the topic of interest.
- Example files for many math topics are available by clicking on “Help -> Example Files” and then a topic of interest.
Please visit www.fluiditysoftware.com for additional help resources.
Troubleshooting
Why does it say “Hardware Warning!” in the menu bar? If no pen input devices are detected on your computer then a menu item “Hardware warning!” will appear on the menu bar. FluidMath is designed to work with pen input collected at a high sample rate. Mouse input is collected at a much lower rate and will not work as well. This warning can be caused by a driver problem on some Tablet PC’s, a driver problem with external digitizing devices, and on some interactive whiteboards.
If you are trying to use a Wacom tablet device for pen input, this fix from Microsoft may fix the problem http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB2328751. Click on the “Downloads” tab and install the correct driver (x86 for 32-bit machines or x64 for 64-bit machines).
If you are using a HP Elitebook 2740p Tablet PC, installing the Tablet PC driver 7.01-8 or later at http://www.wacom.com/tabletpc/driver.cfm should fix your problem.
For the latest details on this problem, please return to this page.
Installation and Configuration Information for System Administrators
This section provides reference information for system administrators. It may be useful, for example, if you want to automate or semi-automate the installation of FluidMath on multiple machines. We do not give specific approaches for mass installation as there are many possible approaches. But we hope this information is sufficient for your particular approach. If you have any questions, please contact us at fluidmathsupport [at] fluiditysoftware.com .
The generic sequence of steps required to install & activate FluidMath on a machine are:
– Install FluidMath pre-requisites
– Install FluidMath
– Activate FluidMath
The pre-requisites for various operating systems and hardware are given in the table below. ‘X’ denotes a required component. ‘O’ denotes an optional component, e.g., video encoders for recording the screen.
| .NET 4 | Microsoft WMencoder 9 | Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 | Windows XP Tablet PC SDK | Windows XP Tablet PC Recognizer Pack |
Windows 7 | X | O | O |
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Windows Vista | X | O | O |
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Windows XP Tablet PC Edition | X | O | O |
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Windows XP | X | O | O | X | X |
If you would prefer to work with the FluidMath .msi installer, run “FluidMathInstaller.exe” and click the blue “Save msi as” link to save a copy of the .msi installer. You might choose to use this .msi in a script you use for deployment, or to help create a disk image of FluidMath.
Some settings can be specified in a configuration file. By default, FluidMath prompts the user for an activation code when it first runs. You can instead specify the activation code in the FluidMath Configuration file (see “Directories and Files” below for where on disk to create the Config.xml file). You can also specify whether a notification appears in the GUI when an update is available.
Example “Config.xml” file:
<Config>
<ActivationCode> ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU </Activation>
<DontShowUpdates> True </DontShowUpdates>
</Config>
Directories and Files. The following directories and files may be used by FluidMath.
[CommonApplicationData]\Fluidity Software\FluidMath\
[CommonApplicationData]\Fluidity Software\FluidMath\Config.xml
[CommonApplicationData]\Fluidity Software\FluidMath\LicenseFile*.xml
On Windows 7/Vista, [CommonApplicationData] is “C:\ProgramData\” and on Windows XP it is: “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\”.
License files can be installed in a custom location. To do so, you should decide which directory you want the license file to be in. The file & directory will need to be read-accessible by any users you want to run FluidMath. Next, create an environment variable (here is a tutorial that may be useful) named “FLUIDMATH_LICENSEFILE_DIR” and set its value to the path to the directory that contains the license file. The directory must exist– FluidMath will not create it & you will see a warning message if the directory does not exist. You should set this configuration before running FluidMath the first time so the license file will be put in your custom location. If you already ran FluidMath you can copy it from the default directory location described above.
Error log file. If you see a dialog box reporting “Sorry, but an error has occurred. It may not be possible to recover from this error. Do you want to try to continue anyway?”, then there was an internal problem that has been logged in the file “fluidmath_error_log.bin”. You can report the problem to Fluidity Software and email the log file to help find a solution. To locate the file “fluidmath_error_log.bin”, note that the dialog box has a blue link labelled “Show log file” — clicking this will open a file explorer and highlight the file. Or, you can navigate to the file. On Windows 7 and Vista machines, the file is located here:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local \fluidmath_error_log.bin
and on Windows XP machines it is located here:
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\fluidmath_error_log.bin