For the platforms that Swarm is known to work, we have also provided binary distributions. Please follow the links on the Swarm website to these distributions, and follow the conventions of your systems's package manager to perform installation. For example, Windows and MacOS X come with their own installation program for Swarm, and for Redhat Linux, the distribution is in the form of RPMs. Source-based builds are possible, but we advise simply using the binaries, as there are a number of required packages which need to be communicated to the Swarm build process. Should you try this yourself, you'll find it works much as any GNU-like package. Simply provide the paths to the dependent packages as shown in the --help option to the configure program.
Installation of Swarm for Java consists of installing the relevant package for your system. For Windows this involves unpacking the distribution archive. For MacOS this is accomplished by installing the larger distribution package. For Linux, this is accomplished by installing the RPM specifically for Java in conjunction to the main RPM package of Swarm. See details on the website(s) linked by the Swarm web page for each.
Once installed, usage requires three environment variables to be set. First, CLASSPATH must include the files swarm.jar and kawa.jar. Typically these will be found in the share/swarm. Follow the path delimiter conventions for your system and prepend the appropriate installation before that subpath. Secondly, on Windows, it will be necessary to have the javaswarm.dll file in the PATH. (Other DLLs will be found in the Swarm binary directory such as the DLL for Tcl and Tk. The installation of these CLASSPATH and PATH directories are up to you, but they will share the same base path. You will need to set this path by setting SWARMHOME. On Windows, this path should be a Windows style absolute pathname like c:/Swarm-2.2-java. On Linux, it will typically have the value of /usr. On Mac, it will be /usr/local.