Table of Contents
Weft QDA is fully supported on Microsoft Windows. Weft QDA is known to work on various versions of Microsoft Windows including XP, 2000, ME, 98 and NT4. Windows XP or 2000 are recommended if possible simply because these are the most common and so best tested platforms for running Weft. The easiest way to install Weft on Windows is to use an all-in-one easy installer package - see the section called “Easy Installer for Windows” below.
Weft QDA is known to work major Linux distributions including Debian, Redhat Ubuntu and Mandrake and will likely work on many other *nixes. Because of the variationsin Linux distributions and tools, installation is a slightly more involved process than on Microsoft Windows. You should have some familiarity with using your distribution's package manager and compiling applications using gcc.
Weft QDA does not currently work on OS X. However, pending developments in wxruby, it is likely to be possible to run Weft QDA on OS X in the future. If you are looking for a free CAQDAS package native to OS X, you may be interested in TAMS Analyzer, which is a stable and fully-featured package.
An advantage of Weft's simplicity is that it will run on quite modest computer hardware. Hardware requirements will vary depending on your operating system and project size, but a Pentium processor and 32MB of RAM should be adequate for Weft QDA itself.
Weft QDA makes use various other free software components and libraries. If you are using the Windows installer package, all of these components are already bundled together for you; there is no need to download or install any additional software. You can skip this section and go to the section called “Easy Installer for Windows”. If you are using Weft QDA on GNU/Linux, some or all of these items may need to be installed separately before Weft can be used.
A recent (>1.8) version of the Ruby interpreter; http://www.ruby-lang.org/. Ruby is the object-oriented programming language in which Weft QDA is written.
The SQLite library, version 2; http://www.sqlite.org/ . SQLite is a small, file-based relational database which Weft uses to store project documents and categories.
Weft QDA users two add-on packages: sqlite-ruby , the ruby bindings for sqlite, version 2.2.x; http://www.rubyforge.org/projects/sqlite-ruby, and PageTemplate, v 2.x.
The WxWidgets library, version 2.4.2; http://www.wxwidgets.org. Version 2.4, not 2.6 is required. WxWidgets enables the creation of native GUIs (graphical user interfaces) on different desktop operating systems.
GTK is a Linux interface toolkit, and is only required if you are using Linux as WxWidgets is built on top it. In many Linux distributions it will already be installed. In almost all others, it should be available through the package manager, and will be most easily installed by this method instead of compiling from source. On Ubuntu Linux, for example, GTK 1.2 can be installed using "apt-get install libgtk1.2-dev". http://www.gtk.org/
WxRuby, the ruby bindings to the WxWidgets library, version 0.6.0; http://rubyforge.org/projects/wxruby. wxruby2, the redevelopment of wxruby SWIG doesn't yet support all the features needed for Weft.
The PDFtoText utility is required if you want to import documents from PDF documents. The utility is available from http://www.xpdf.org, and the executable should be installed somewhere in your PATH.